


Consequences

by Redisaid



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate title: A Series of Increasingly Awkward Conversations, Angst, Because BFA is awful, Don't read this garbage please, F/F, Fluff, Get out of my head demon, I hate this fic, It got funny, It's a fucking magic baby AU, Mental Health Issues, No BFA AU, Were you ever so mad at yourself for writing something so good for something you just do not like?, When you selfishly want yourself a baby and you get a wife out of it too, fuck my teeth are rotting help, who let that happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:14:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23075320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redisaid/pseuds/Redisaid
Summary: "You're mad," Sylvanas told her."That's what everyone says these days," Jaina relented. Because it was true.
Relationships: Jaina Proudmoore/Sylvanas Windrunner
Comments: 433
Kudos: 1156





	1. Obsession and Honesty

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot stress how much I hate kid fics and especially magic babies. I just personally don't like them as a matter of my own taste. Well, normally. But I've officially lost it. Why am I fucking doing this to myself?
> 
> I blame UninspiredPoet for encouraging me. Also for letting me steal her Windrunner family headcanons again.
> 
> I also blame whatever bad piece of meat I ate this week for giving me the fucked up dreams that inspired this.

"Lilac, grain, and enough mana gems to set a new constellation into the stars. I see my sister's warnings about you were correct."

"Yet here you are."

They stood on a cliff. A different cliff from the last time she'd tried this. This one overlooked the sea as it crashed into the shores of Lordaeron. Before, it had been on another continent, above a view of the ruins of Theramore, but today's attempts called upon different energies. Older, deeper sufferings.

But sufferings all the same.

"You're mad," Sylvanas told her. 

The wind whipped at the hood of the Warchief's cloak, daring to displace it from her ashen hair. Only daring, though. It never managed to make good on its threats.

"That’s what everyone says these days," Jaina relented. Because it was true. 

Ever since she had gone running from Dalaran, and even since she had reappeared as an advisor at High King Anduin's table in these last few months after the defeat of the Burning Legion, everyone spoke in whispers of how she had lost her mind. How the woman that remained here was not the Jaina Proudmoore of old, but instead a wretch to be pitied and avoided. An unstable and volatile version of her former self, just as likely to lash out in anger as to be found weeping to herself in dark corners of the keep.

She had long since started to agree with such notions.

"Yet here you are," Jaina repeated.

Here was a ritual circle that encased a simple fire, and a large, flat rock that acted as an altar. Mana crystals and glowing runes alighted the earth around it. Sylvanas stood before the gap in them that had been meant for her to enter.

"Here I am," Sylvanas said, still not moving. Still eyeing her warily as Jaina stoked the fire against the wind.

She had to know what this was. Even without a warning, she would have. It was her people, after all, who had perfected such magics. Her people who had need of such things, with their reliance on magic and much more flexible notions of what constituted a relationship. 

As disappointingly far away as she was, Jaina realized that this was probably as close as they'd ever been to one another. They had met before, perhaps a handful of times over the years. At negotiating tables and staggering at the end of battles, both on opposite and united fronts. Sylvanas though, as Jaina saw her now, was taller than her sisters. Still small and slight as high elves were, but perhaps it was in the way that she carried herself. Stiff and militant, but still full of swagger. Her features were more refined than Alleria's, but more classically beautiful than when compared to Vereesa’s pixie nose and fuller cheeks.

Still, there was no mistaking her resemblance to her sisters, save that Sylvanas' skin was a deathly ashen gray, and her blonde hair was bleached and brittle from the grave. Oh, and those eyes. Red as blood, and glowing hotter than the fire that burned between them. Jaina had always found them hard to look at. Especially now that they searched her for answers that she wasn't sure she wished to volunteer. Answers that Sylvanas would be owed, in time.

"What I don't understand is why I am here. I understand what it is you are trying to do, but not what I have to do with it," Sylvanas said as she leveled that crimson gaze.

"Vereesa turned me down," Jaina offered as an explanation. Nevermind that Vereesa has turned her down, vehemently, several times, not just once. Nevermind that Vereesa was now no longer speaking to her because of the last time she did just that. Nevermind that Vereesa had threatened to reveal all of this to Jaina's remaining friends and allies in Stormwind and discredit whatever shred of sanity she might have had left in their minds. 

She would have been justified in doing so.

"I still fail to understand. I know the ritual. It requires two people bound by love, by an act of joy. You and I, Proudmoore, share no such thing," Sylvanas went on.

"Nor do I with your sister," Jaina answered, looking toward the fire again as she set another log against it. It was nearly hot enough now. "But we share something that would work in its stead. I have found that this ritual requires an extreme emotional connection only. It doesn't have to be a happy one to produce the necessary elements. I was hoping to use the fact that your sister and I both grieve deeply for Theramore and all we lost there. She wouldn't allow it."

"Because of what you hope to gain from it," Sylvanas spat.

"Hence why you call me mad." Jaina found herself smiling. It was insane. It was desperate. It was her last, unfulfilled and unhinged desire. The final spark of a dying flame. 

"You are that desperate for a child?"

There it was. The question of the hour. Well, of the last few years for Jaina. 

She could repeat the answers to it over and over in her head. She did nearly every day. They were what drove her to get out of bed every morning, to continue her farce of life in Stormwind. 

So why was it so hard to speak them now?

Even so, she began, "I have lost everything that was dear to me. Everything. All of it was taken from me, bit by bit. My authority in Dalaran, Theramore before that, my father and my family who shunned me for what happened to him, my youth and innocence here in Lordaeron before the Scourge. Everyone who has ever shown me love has left me behind, willingly or not. But--"

"And you think that having a child would somehow take all of that away? You are as sick as they say," Sylvanas interrupted.

"I know it won't. But you don't understand. I don't expect you to, and frankly I don't need you to," Jaina told her as she stood up, staring down that red glare as if it didn't intimidate her in the least. "All I want is something that is mine. Ever since I was a little girl, still new to these shores, I dreamed of the children I would one day raise here in Lordaeron. Back then, I thought they would be its heirs. A disgusting thought now. I know. But that was what I wanted."

"Knowing exactly how cruel this world can be, you still want that?" Sylvanas wondered, one long brow slightly raised. Her arms were crossed over her chest now, haughty and guarded at the same time.

"I do. Like I said, I don't need you to understand," Jaina said. She knew that there was no point in justifying her reasons to Sylvanas. And she had come knowing what this was, so perhaps there was no need to.

Perhaps.

"What then could you and I possibly share to bind us over, should you be correct in your assumptions?" Sylvanas asked.

Jaina simply gestured back toward the slope that led up to the cliff. She pointed to the rotting pines and blighted patches of land that dotted a darkened and dreary Lordaeron. So far removed from the idyllic boreal forest she grew up in, playing princess to Arthas' prince. "What else? The Scourge. There is only one person in this world who I know could fully understand the suffering it caused. You, Sylvanas Windrunner, must know that even better than I. You lived it, and continue to live it even after death. We didn't suffer together, but we suffered alike for it."

She laughed. Sylvanas actually laughed. It was a strange sound, doubled over in her banshee voice. "You wish then to extract an essence from me? From my suffering? You think that equivalent to your own? Foolish mage…"

"Equivalency hardly matters. I am not here to debate who had it worse. We would be here for days doing just that. But I understand the ritual must be done while the flowers are fresh. Lilac is nearly out of season, you know," Jaina said. She was afraid of this. She did not have the time or energy for it. 

No. These days, this ritual was all she had time for. The study of it, and now the practice. Her runes were perfectly drawn. The flowers were soft and sweet, a beautiful shade of warm purple, and fragrant as they would ever be. Everything was right. Everything was ready. Well, almost everything.

Sylvanas stopped her staring for a moment to look around the site. For an elven ritual, it was all very primitive, but perhaps that was fitting. This was a primal thing, after all. That part Jaina could not explain. This was just something she needed. Something she had always needed.

"Has it not occurred to you that you might just sleep with men and achieve the same result?" Sylvanas questioned as her eyes lifted back to Jaina.

"I would not be doing this if that were the case. Believe me. I tried. My body was...changed in Theramore. Changed to the point where I cannot seem to conceive by conventional means," Jaina answered.

Oh how disgustingly easy it was to explain away all the shame. The nights she had spent abed with anyone who would take her--her appearance usually disguised with magic so that the shame didn't follow her name afterward. But none of it had mattered. None of those desperate nights had mattered. She was too broken. Too stained with magic and bloodshed for life to cling to her.

But this. This would be different. This child would be created from magic itself. It would be half elven too. It would have to work. If not with one sister, then the other. Too bad she didn’t share anything with Alleria, or Jaina would have asked her too.

Sylvanas looked down again. This time at her feet. The wind had stopped. Her elegant cloak, severe and dramatic in it's wine-colored silk, dragged behind her as she took a few steps forward, into the circle.

Jaina found herself without words. The calm resilience that she found so easy to hold onto when focused on this one task slipped, for just a moment.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because you are not the only one who has been stripped of a choice," Sylvanas answered as she stood before her. 

Only the fire separated them now. Jaina could smell her. Rosewater, like one might use to keep a corpse fresh at a wake. Or maybe just a preferred bathing product. 

In a moment of panic, Jaina realized she hadn't accounted for how undeath might affect the ritual. But it was too late for that. She had to try. Sylvanas was in the circle. She had consented in all aspects aside from the words she would have to say.

Why, though? Did she pity Jaina? Did she wish for her to stop bothering her sister? Did they even speak anymore? They had to. She'd said Vereesa had warned her. And Jaina had indeed threatened to try this with Sylvanas last time. But no...why would she want this?

Jaina shook herself from that questioning, both physically and mentally. No. Now was not the time.

She was going to get what she wanted. What she needed.

She asked no further questions as she stripped off the coat she wore over her robes. Old robes. Elven style, from her days in Dalaran. They fit her now as they hadn't in years past. Now, when she barely ate and barely slept. When she was so consumed with her obsession and with her grief that she fit into clothes she wore in her teens and early twenties.

But she needed them. Elven robes with their bare midriffs had their uses, as impractical as they were against the cold, stale, and befouled air of Lordaeron.

"You are skin and bones," Sylvanas sneered. "I have summoned skeletons with more meat to them than you."

"What does it matter?" Jaina spat back as she checked the bowl of grain one last time to be sure none of it was rotten. 

"This isn't healthy," Sylvanas noted.

"Nothing about me is healthy," Jaina relented. At least she admitted as much. "Not anymore."

Sylvanas bit back a further protest. Her fangs briefly flashed in the fire light as they held her lips fast for a moment, then disappeared beyond them.

"Do you know what to do?" Jaina asked her.

"Stand here and agree," Sylvanas answered bluntly. 

That was most of it. She wasn't wrong.

"It will hurt," Jaina cautioned. She had read as much. It would likely hurt them both.

But pain was of little consequence to her now.

"You think that this will work on me precisely because you seem to think I've already endured a great deal of pain. What more can you do to me compared to what has been done? I know what you are asking for," Sylvanas said as she leaned over the fire. “Or at least I know what the stories say.”

"You were warned. And if you did not follow my request to come alone--"

"I am alone," Sylvanas all but snarled. "You have my word."

Jaina's hands were shaking. Why now, of all times? She breathed in deeply to steady them. The air smelt of death and smoke and roses. A strange combination. It didn't seem right. This was supposed to be a sacred and holy thing. Full of ease and joy. 

Though Jaina supposed the natural alternative was not much better. It was sweat and confusion, mixed sometimes with pleasure and sometimes regret. Different smells. Not pleasant either.

She switched her words to the fluid tongue of the elves, noting Sylvanas' ears as they pricked ever so slightly forward at the sound of her native language. She has spoken these words so many times over. To herself. Only ever to herself. Jaina never really thought that anyone would agree to hear them.

"I prepare the fire of life. I feed the flames with the seed of the field."

Red eyes kept the vigilant hold on her as Jaina cast a handful grain into the fire, then another. 

"I perfume it with the scent of new beginnings," she went on as she plucked the blossoms from a branch of lilac and tossed them into the flames as well.

"I call upon the powers of old to hear my request," Jaina said as she drew from the mana crystals that surrounded them. 

The world outside the circle blurred as thin tendrils of magic flowed upward, like defiant streaks of rain, above their heads, before cascading down to mix with the flames. Blue and purple arcane on red fire. A clash of contrasts, promising power in its mixture.

"I ask from you for the essence of our life together," a lie. Always a lie. "To imbue our body and spirit into one."

Jaina raised her hands above the flames. She could feel the heat licking at her palms, promising and threatening at the same time.

Sylvanas mirrored her. "I give it freely."

It didn't matter what she said. It just had to be any form of yes. What followed was not what Jaina had expected, but everything she should have.

The magic redirected its path from the flames and instead began to swirl around Sylvanas. Jaina watched as the mana stream circled her once, then twice. Slowly, as if deciding. Then it flashed across her chest, glowing across a jagged line that ripped from sternum to navel. A scar, hidden beneath her armor. A massive, twisted scar that only one blade could have made.

It was working.

Sylvanas hissed. She kept her hands in place, but set her teeth against something. Against pain, or perhaps the sudden invasion of her darkest hour.

As Jaina could smell the tang of burnt flesh, she knew it to be pain.

Sylvanas grunted against it as a tremor shook her hands. Still, they stayed in place. It was only when they both heard bubbling that she faltered, but only for a moment.

"What are you doing to me, witch?" Sylvanas whispered through the sharp grit of her teeth.

"I don't know," Jaina answered honestly. "The books I've read only speak about the usual method. Joy and love and all that. This...this is something I only heard stories of."

"If you kill me with this, I--I--" Sylvanas didn't get to finish her threat. A scream tore itself from her throat. This one oddly entirely physical in nature. No overtone. No, it was the body the spell was after now. The banshee spirit within it was secondary.

The magic coalesced out of her, pooling in front of Sylvanas' hips. With it came a glowing, writhing mass. A purple-tinged collection of energy. Within it a thousand tiny faces screamed silent screams. All of them with beautiful features and long elven ears, the same as the woman who had produced it.

Jaina had seen these before, but not as raw or as powerful. They were in jars and alchemist's bottles, subdued and locked away. Smaller. Less angry. But that was what it was all the same. An essence of suffering.

Sylvanas was panting now, though she needn't breathe. Her body reacted as it would if it were still living. Shocked and injured. Violated by the exposure of her violation. 

"What do I do?" she whispered as she watched the distilled version of her horror float before her.

"Cast it into the flames," Jaina said. "Give it up so I can make something new from it. Something better."

All it took was a little push. Sylvanas didn't even touch the essence. She just waved the magic that surrounded it into the flames. It seemed to know what to do.

The screams of the essence were forever bound in silence as it fell into the fire. It was quickly reduced to nothing but thick, cloying smoke.

It was time.

"We will prove ourselves worthy of our gift. We call upon the powers of life, of the old and the new, and of what we share, to create."

The Thalassian words were beautiful. Jaina had always thought it a pretty language. But now, to finally be invoking them into the spell? They had never sounded better.

The fire flared into a righteous blaze. So hot that both of them immediately had to draw the hands away and step back so as not to be consumed. Wood and grain and flowers and magic and essence alike were consumed within mere moments. As fast as it had flared up, the fire became cinders, then smoldering ash.

Ash that Jaina quickly stooped to pick up, lest the wind take it. Nothing would take this from her. Not now. Not ever.

It was all she had left.

It was only a handful in the end. Just enough. With a hand that threatened to tremble, Jaina dipped her fingers into the ash and used it to draw a rune onto her sweat-slicked bare stomach. Just a single rune. A simple prayer if ever there was one.

Life.

She waited for something. Anything. Any indication. 

Her books hadn't spoken of that. Neither had the stories. They had just taught her the words to the spell and listed the ingredients and requirements. They did not say how it would end, only what it would result in.

There had to be more, right?

It ended with black ash on her hands and her belly. With fatigue looming over her, even deeper in its presence than usual. The mana crystals were spent, as were her own inner reserves. The wind stirred again, scattering whatever ashes she didn't manage to scoop up and revealing a scorch mark on the ground. 

It ended with Sylvanas staring at her again with those horrible red eyes. "Did it work?"

Jaina has to answer, "I don't know."

"I feel...numb," Sylvanas muttered. 

"I feel nothing," Jaina said. Even as the tears rolled down her cheeks, she felt nothing.

\---

A little over a month later, Jaina was sitting in on a meeting between Baine Bloodhoof and Anduin. Baine had been chosen to represent the Horde in the peace negotiations between the factions. The Warchief herself could not attend. She could never attend. She always had an excuse.

Jaina couldn't blame her. After all, she didn't much want to be in the same room with herself these days. She couldn't blame Sylvanas for feeling the same way. Not after she had turned away from Jaina before on the cliffs, leaving her hollow in her bitterness and alone once again.

Sylvanas was right. She had been a fool. And now that Jaina knew her twisted desires were no longer possible to fulfill, she was actually starting to make herself an asset to the young king. She had kept him from listening to that warmonger Greymane at least. She was vaguely aware of the fact that doing just that had prevented them from going to war with the Horde again on at least two separate occasions in the last week. Everyone still looked at her like she was a puppy that had just been kicked, or a beggar in the street, but not Anduin.

Vereesa still wouldn’t speak to her. She would look at her from across the room sometimes. When she thought Jaina wasn’t looking, she would shake her head, or whisper something to Alleria. But she never so much as mentioned anything about the other sister. If she had heard about what Jaina had done with Sylvanas, then Vereesa certainly would have broken her silence to give her a piece of her mind. So it seemed that what had happened that day on the cliffs had remained between them and only them. Thankfully. Blessedly, even. 

But Anduin. Anduin trusted her. She still had a place here, at his side. And for that, despite this last failure, Jaina could keep getting out of bed in the morning. At least, most mornings.

Today, that had been a questionable choice. It was only mid-morning and she was utterly exhausted. She had slept the night before too. Not well. She never slept well, but still, she had slept.

"You look tired, aunty," Anduin observed as they paused to wait on more paperwork to be brought in for this next phase of the treaty. "Should I have someone bring us coffee?"

"That would be lovely," Jaina said with a nod. She stood, suddenly finding the air of the small meeting room they occupied today to be stifling. "I'm going to take a walk to wake myself up as well. I'll be back in a few minutes."

"Take your time, Jaina," Baine boomed from the other side of the table. "It's just the trade agreements. You can rest today if you need to."

"I will be fine," she assured him as she walked out the door and into the halls of the castle.

She was not fine. She was too hot. She was dizzy. She was wide awake and nearly asleep at the same time. And she was suddenly violently nauseous. 

Jaina was used to abusing her body. She was very well-versed in the effects of a poor diet and even poorer sleeping habits. This was not one of them. 

But she would be fine. There was no need to panic. She just...she needed some air. 

Jaina found a patio. It overlooked the royal gardens. Spring was turning to summer. The flowers were at their most earnest of efforts, painting the hedgerows and planters with color. But not the lilacs. Their season had come and gone, and Jaina had all but ruined them in her research.

The fresh air felt good, until it didn't. Until Jaina was heaving over the side of the patio railing, leaving her breakfast amongst the flower beds below.

She had not imagined that her first reaction to learning that her spell had worked would be this, but it was simply the word, "Shit," as she wiped the bile from her lips.

\---

"Warchief."

The deathguard that rasped the word out sounded hesitant. This was bad news. 

Sylvanas wondered what it could be. These days, there was little in the way of bad news. The Legion had been defeated. Some enterprising champions of both the Alliance and the Horde were working together to help Magni Bronzebeard heal the wound that had been inflicted upon Azeroth. And, perhaps thanks to her lack of involvement, for once, the factions had managed to negotiate themselves a tidy bit of peace. Enough that she could split her time between Orgrimmar and the Undercity without feeling as though either would be attacked in the absence of her presence. 

"Speak," she bade him. Armistice or not, she still didn't like being interrupted when she was in her office. Not even in the comfort of her personal chambers in the Royal Quarter.

"Your dark rangers wished me to inform you that they have investigated the magical disturbance that was detected up above."

"And?"

"Jaina Proudmoore is wandering around the ruins."

That was never a phrase she had expected to hear. But Sylvanas didn't let on to why that was as she asked, "Is she alone?"

"Yes. They are watching her from afar. No sign of others with her," the guard reported.

"What is she doing?" Sylvanas questioned.

"Just looking around, it seems," the deathguard offered with a slight shrug. "What are your orders, Dark Lady?"

Sylvanas was already grabbing her cloak from the rack by the door. She threw it over her head, threading her elven ears into the holes in its hood. “I will deal with this. Tell the rangers to keep to their posts and stay out of it unless I signal otherwise.”

“At once, Dark Lady.”

Sylvanas didn’t pay much attention to his reply. She was busy deciding if the urgency of the situation required her to rip free of her corporeal form and shoot up through halls of the Undercity and into the ruins. She thought better of the idea. No. Proudmoore was not here as a threat. 

When she found her, Sylvanas confirmed the reports were true. Jaina was looking about the buildings of the old palace complex with a sort of bemused look on her features. A wan, thoughtful smile. 

But she was dressed as if for travel. A hooded cloak shaded her mostly stark white hair. A rucksack hung lazily from one shoulder. A well-worn spellbook was slung on her belt. She used her powerful staff merely as a walking stick, not as a conduit for her magic. At least, not yet.

“Based on our last conversation, I didn’t think you would have any nostalgia for this place. You are full of surprises, Proudmoore,” Sylvanas finally said as she approached her. 

Jaina must have been well-aware of her presence. She didn’t startle or even turn around to face her. “These are surprising times. I was wondering how long it would take for someone to come up and ask me what I was doing. I had not thought it would be you directly.”

“Even alone, you are a powerful enough woman that you are better observed than confronted,” Sylvanas told her.

“Look at you, a true tactician. Yet you are here, alone. Well, except for the dozens of pairs of undead eyes I feel on me,” Jaina noted.

“Here I am,” Sylvanas said. The mirrored nature of this conversation didn’t miss her. Even if their last encounter had been months ago, it was not one that Sylvanas was due to easily forget. Being that she had not heard a word from Jaina since, she felt correct in her assumption that it had resulted in nothing. 

Well, nothing but her continued numbness. Nothing but the fact that her tortured soul felt slightly less tortured. That she couldn’t be as bitter anymore, as angry about what had been done to her. She still was. She could still wail her despair into the night, should she want to. But, she didn’t feel as though she had a need to. At least, not every night. It made her easier to deal with, or so she was told. Even Nathanos had asked her what had her in a halfway decent mood more than once in the last few months. 

So, if anything, Sylvanas had Jaina to thank for ripping that sticky, writhing mess of her pain from her and burning it. Even if it had only been a fraction. She’d hardly noticed at first, but apparently, it was enough to make a difference.

It seemed like she wasn’t the only one these last few months had changed. Jaina still wore half a smile as she leaned on her staff. Her hollowed cheeks were fuller now, only slightly. The dark bags under her eyes were the same, but there was a lightness to the blue of them. A spark that had been just a startling dullness when last they’d met. Clearly, she had found some new obsession to string herself along on. Or perhaps she was just getting better. Living things were prone to change, after all.

“There’s more intact buildings than I remembered from before,” Jaina said as she turned to look at Sylvanas, then gestured out to the ruins.

“You were hardly here for sightseeing when you came here last with Varian,” Sylvanas stated. It was true. They were here to liberate, then immediately threaten to steal her city. A city neither of them had fought for. A city they had abandoned to ruin. A people they had cast off as mindless, undead thralls.

“I spent nearly ten years of my life here,” Jaina started as she began walking through the ruined courtyard they were in yet again. “I first met Archmage Antonidas in this courtyard when I was still just a girl. He came to court on a diplomatic visit. Queen Lianne was so kind as to insist he meet me and test my skills. I was playing with Calia over there when I first saw him.” She pointed across the ruins with her staff.

Over there was a pile of rubble. A column that had collapsed, taking the roof above it down with it. Once, it might have been a covered walkway that lined the edge of the courtyard, with doors leading off to corridors of bed chambers and living quarters. Such was human architecture--ever spreading outward on the ground, so rarely seeking the sky.

“I am allowed some nostalgia,” Jaina said in the wake of Sylvanas’ silence.

“I doubt that would be the sole motivator of such a visit,” Sylvanas tried to lead her. 

“You’re doing the tactician thing again,” Jaina told her as she started to pick her way out of a whole in the outer wall of the courtyard, and out onto a pathway.

Sylvanas had no choice but to follow her to press for the answer to the question she had not exactly asked, but was well aware that Jaina was avoiding.

“The court mage’s tower seems pretty sound,” Jaina noted when she stopped again, looking up to the bulky, angular tower that loomed above what likely used to be a garden. “I always hated Master Caerwell. He thought himself so important, you know? He doesn’t still, hmm, live isn’t the correct word, is it? He doesn’t...reside downstairs, does he?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Sylvanas answered. She remembered the man. He was indeed self-important and self-serving. A tick clinging to Terenas’ hide. If he had even been raised, then he had not lasted long enough for Sylvanas to meet him again in death.

“Good. Then he can’t object to this,” Jaina said. She started in the direction of the tower.

“You’ve given me no choice to be blunt, Proudmoore. What are you doing here?” Sylvanas asked as she found herself hurrying after the mage again.

“Looking for a new place to hide,” Jaina answered plainly. “The ones I favored during the Legion’s invasion won’t suit anymore. And I don’t have much more time left to slip away.”

“Please. Be plain. For the sake of the treaty I hear you have worked so hard on with your king and my advisors,” Sylvanas pressed, even going so far as to stride ahead of Jaina and stand in her way.

Jaina stopped short of her, but close enough so that Sylvanas could feel the huff of her breath as she sighed out her displeasure at the request for honesty. But, after that long sigh, Jaina relented, “I can get away with a few more weeks of creative clothing choices, but then I’ll start showing through everything. Questions will be asked. It’s easier if I just stay away until I can decide what to do in the long term.”

“Excuse me?” These words were all Sylvanas could think to say. A simple, Common expression that did not cover the profound nature of her bewilderment.

“I figured you would be inclined to assist me, as it were,” Jaina said as her eyes darted down to her feet briefly, then back up in askance. “And I didn’t think that offering up an abandoned building in your territory for me to stay in would be much of an ask. So there it is.”

Sylvanas’ jaw threatened to lock up. She had to get the words out before it did. “Are you telling me that--”

“Yes, it worked,” Jaina answered simply. 

“And you are--”

“Pregnant, yes. Running away from Stormwind, yes. Utterly confused by all of this, yes. Completely without a solid plan for any of it, yes,” Jaina reported, nodding to each of these. “I was quite certain, as you were, that nothing had happened. At least I was, until I started puking my guts out every morning. Now I get to continue to enjoy that on top of being constantly exhausted, and blowing up like a balloon. I am starting to understand why Vereesa insisted I would be truly insane for wishing this upon myself.”

That...couldn’t be possible. Nothing had happened. All that magic, all that furor, and it had left them just staring at each other on the cliffs that evening. Silent and still but for the wind.

And despite her improved moods, Sylvanas had spent many a night brooding over that moment as only she could. Cursing her impulsive decision to agree to the request in the first place. Damning her foolish notions that it could work at all. But mostly, trying to understand why it had ever seemed like a good idea to her. Why, knowing what she knew, existing as she did, she would want to have any part in creating another living thing in this world? 

She honestly never came to an answer that suited her. But it hadn’t mattered, because nothing had happened.

Yet here, the evidence of her folly stood in front of her. Somehow, Jaina Proudmoore of all people had successfully completed the Aranal’dorei right. With her. With a corpse.

No. That couldn’t be right. “And you are quite certain that this...condition isn’t a result of your efforts by more conventional means?”

“I haven’t been with a man in over a year, so I’m pretty sure that’s out of the question. I never took you for the jealous type. But I supposed that’s not fair. I hardly know you,” Jaina offered.

Sylvanas found herself without words. She only looked at Jaina instead. She had put on some weight. Not a lot, but some. And the hand that wasn’t on her staff seemed to fall distinctly near her belly, as if to hide it. As if practiced at hiding it. Thoughtful of the need for such things.

“Now, about that tower?” Jaina pressed as she started to walk around Sylvanas.

“Proudmoore--” Sylvanas started, though she wasn’t sure what she would say after the name.

“I’m not living down in the sewers, if you’re going to ask that. It’s better if I’m up here, out of the way and able to breathe,” Jaina told her. She continued up the path to the tower and shouldered the heavy door to it open without even so much as an ounce of hesitation.

“Just...wait. Wait for one moment,” Sylvanas stammered. She hadn’t stammered in years. 

Jaina stopped and turned to face her in the dim first floor of the tower. There was nothing here but cobwebs and the stairs leading upward. All of Lordaeron’s capital had been looted mercilessly, first by its own citizens as they panicked in the wake of the destruction of the city, then anything left was taken by Garithos’ forces when he sought to take control of it in his greed. A short-lived, and lively little empire he’d made for himself indeed, just before Sylvanas had ordered her pet dreadlord to kill him. Anything of value left after that had been repurposed in the new city her Forsaken had built below.

As many questions as she had and couldn’t put words to, Sylvanas didn’t stop to ask them, but bolted up the stairs with the explanation, “Let me tell them to leave.”

“Who?” came the question from downstairs.

“My rangers. They favor high places,” Sylvanas spoke amidst the rhythm of her feet on the steps.

They favored high places because it reminded them of the towers of Quel’thalas. Because they still liked to be close to the sun. Because they too, did not like to spend their days in the sewers. 

Vain and haughty elves, even in death, the lot of them.

But the tower top was already empty. Sylvanas knew that Anya and Loralen favored this one. She could see it in the evidence they left behind. A chaise lounge that had been dragged in front of one of the large windows overlooking the ruins, only missing a small chunk of its plush cushion. Nests of dried flowers covering the places where the plaster had cracked away from the walls. A bookshelf, bare of books, and instead laden with odd trinkets. Animal bones. Broken jewelry. Glass vials stolen from the Apothecaries.

A place that, in short, reeked of elven refuge. At least to one who knew enough to see it. 

“There’s no one here,” Jaina said as she mounted the last of the steps only a few minutes after Sylvanas. She clearly had trouble following orders.

“Not now there isn’t,” Sylvanas agreed, partially.

Jaina came to stand next to her. Well, beside her. A good three feet to her left. Maybe four. “Oh. I thought all of you lived below.”

“Not always.”

“I’m learning a lot today,” Jaina observed. “Are you telling me that this tower is not suitable then?”

“I am telling you that I don’t know what to do with you,” Sylvanas admitted as she walked over to the little corner of the room that wasn’t abandoned and began to lament over how annoyed her rangers would be about losing this hideout. Because she had already given up. Because nothing else made sense. Because if she was going to face the facts of all of this, she would honestly feel better having Jaina within arms reach of her. 

What an odd notion.

“I will inform my rangers that they should seek another tower,” Sylvanas spoke as she turned back to face Jaina again. “I do not know why you wish to live in this cursed place, but I understand that you might be lacking in alternatives.”

“It was all I could think of for now,” Jaina said with another heavy sigh. “I told Anduin I wished to undertake a bit of a pilgrimage and made my excuses to leave already. He has no further need of me now that the treaty is signed.”

“Fair enough,” Sylvanas could have thought of a hundred better excuses than that, but she supposed she wasn’t the one being pressed to disappear on an ever-ticking timer. “Can I ask one question?”

“I am assuming you have many,” Jaina said as she shrugged off her rucksack and tossed it unceremoniously on the floor. 

“I’ll start with just one,” Sylvanas offered. “Then we shall see about the rest. What will you do after? If and when you have this child?”

“I don’t know,” Jaina answered. She flipped her hood back, revealing the loose braid she had done her white hair up in. The style of a woman who had neither the time, nor the desire to spend any ounce of energy on her hair.

“Will you go back to Stormwind?” Sylvanas pressed further.

“After enough time, I suppose I could manufacture excuses to do so,” Jaina said as she got on one knee and started rifling through her pack.

“But would you want to?” Sylvanas kept asking. So much for her promise of one question.

“I will tell you when we get that far, how about that?” Jaina asked back with a huff. “Why does it matter?”

“My sisters live there,” Sylvanas stated plainly. 

At least, she was pretty certain they still did. Vereesa had not gone back to Dalaran. Her letter warning Sylvanas of Jaina’s ravings and threats to find her to perform Aranal’dorei with her had come from Stormwind, after all. And Alleria was most certainly not welcome back into Quel’thalas after her last attempt to visit it. There was no place else for them to be otherwise.

“So? They still don’t speak to me,” Jaina informed her. 

She was so difficult, this Proudmoore. As difficult here as she was at the negotiating table. As demanding too. “They will start to ask questions if you are toting around a grey-eyed half-elven toddler with you when you return.”

Jaina looked up from her bag. “Grey eyes?”

“I…”

It was a lot to explain. Why had it been the first thought that had come into her mind? Why had she pictured Vereesa and Alleria staring at a child that had their mother’s eyes? Sylvanas’ eyes? Steel and sharpness. Unique and beautiful and highly coveted. Or least they were in the brighter days of Quel’thalas.

“Is that what color they were, before you were raised? Interesting,” Jaina said, her annoyance vanishing into that almost smile again. “I’ve never seen a high elf with any color but blue.”

No. This was not happening. This was…

“I should go inform my rangers that you are taking their hideout from them,” Sylvanas said as she made a beeline for the stairs.

“Tell them the rats have made the place entirely unsuitable,” Jaina suggested, her voice echoing from above. “Particularly one very large rat.” 

Perhaps it was the echo, or the broken, cracking plaster of the walls, but it seemed like she might have been laughing.

\---

When Sylvanas returned to the tower top that night, she was a little better prepared to handle what was waiting for her there. Slightly. Maybe.

Even moreso when it seemed that Jaina was surprised to have her there. But Sylvanas could feel the wards the mage had placed on the tower door. She could feel them intrude upon her and question her presence, then relax, allowing her to pass. 

So she had already made herself that at home, had she?

And in thinking that, Sylvanas was less surprised to find Jaina sitting on the chaise lounge, now dragged in front of the fireplace. The fireplace, which held within it a blaze against the chilly night of autumn’s beginnings. 

Somehow, an entire four post bed had appeared in the few hours that she’d been left alone. And the bookshelves were now half-filled with books. A few rugs lined the bare wooden floors now, which had been swept of the worst of their dust. There was a dining table, notable with its four accompanying chairs. Why four? Was she expecting visitors? That would have to be another discussion. 

But it looked now like a place that a living human might choose to inhabit, rather than a ruin that had been left to rot for something like fifteen years. Through the grace and power of Jaina’s magic, it had been so transformed back into a home in a matter of hours.

And Jaina herself was unconcerned by it. So unconcerned that she remained half-sitting, half-laying on the chaise, bent over the book in her lap.

“Back with more questions?” she asked as Sylvanas reached the top step. She didn’t bother to look up from her book. “I suppose I owe you answers.”

“We are not counting debts, Proudmoore,” Sylvanas answered as she kept to the task she had set for herself and made for the fireplace. 

At least that much had already been taken care of for her. Ah, and there were cooking things now too. A kettle. A spit. A black iron pot. Good. Less trips for her to make up and down these infernal stairs.

Jaina looked up when Sylvanas got close enough. Her eyes fixed exactly where she knew they would, on the golden pheasant she held by the neck in one hand, dispatched an hour so before with an arrow through the eye. Then, at the burlap sack she held in the other.

“What are you doing?” Jaina asked when Sylvanas took a seat on the floor in front of her fire.

Sylvanas answered that as she started to pluck the feathers from the bird. “Making sure you eat.”

“I...I’m perfectly capable of feeding myself,” Jaina tried to argue. Though Sylvanas was busy with the bird, she could hear the book shut and legs shuffling against cloth as Jaina sat up fully.

“I remember counting your ribs that day. I would argue otherwise,” Sylvanas told her.

“I have been better about it,” Jaina countered. “Trust me. Once I knew what was going on, I have made every effort I could to ensure that I didn’t...injure it.”

Sylvanas only offered a grunt to that and kept at her work. A grunt that would have to suffice to explain that this was just something she had to do. That she could remember her father cooking for her mother, when she was pregnant with Vereesa and Lirath. That she had spent the afternoon thinking fondly on those times where she hung around the kitchen to bother them so as he cooked and her mother teased him. They were noble. They were wealthy. They had servants who could easily have made a better meal. But her father always insisted.

And that somehow, in all of this, her undead brain, addled as it was, had come up with the idea that this was where she should start. That she should make sure that her child, and it’s insane, difficult, and all too powerful for her own good mother, were properly fed. 

Plus it was all just a grand excuse to come back here and ask the thousands of questions she had been plagued with ever since their first meeting that morning. 

“I see you are not going to accept that,” Jaina said after a while.

“No,” Sylvanas told her plainly. 

The fire crackled and popped quite a few times before Jaina spoke again. “You don’t need to do this. All I really want from you is maybe the eyes of your spies and rangers to help me stay hidden. And you discretion, but I’m pretty sure I can count on that.”

“Have you perhaps considered what I might want?” Sylvanas asked. That, of course, was the top of the list of her questions. Well, it led into that question. As to why Jaina had waited nearly four months to tell her.

She ripped a particularly large fistful of feathers out of the bird before looking up to where Jaina sat on the chaise, back stiff on looking severe with her braid and tired eyes.

“I thought you would want to have as little to do with me and my madness as possible,” Jaina told her.

“You said it yourself. You hardly know me,” Sylvanas pointed out as she continued her work, but didn’t let Jaina squirm away from her gaze.

“Then what should I know about you?” Jaina asked back. She set the book down beside her and kept a white-knuckled grip on the edge of her seat.

“As twisted and vicious as your side thinks I am...you…” She had been so prepared for this. Why did this woman make her falter?

Or was it the fact now that her hands were finally out of her lap, revealing that yes indeed, there was a noticeable little swell to her belly beneath the clinging fabric of her robes. 

“You’re carrying my child,” Sylvanas blurted out as if that would explain everything.

Jaina cocked her head ever so slightly at her. If she were an elf, her ears would have been alight with movement, shifting curiously forward. But unfortunately, Sylvanas had to read her expression with just short, thin brows and a lip she was worrying with her flat teeth. Humans were such strange, boring things.

“I didn’t take you for a doting parent,” Jaina admitted after a moment.

“I did not know I would be,” Sylvanas told her. “A parent. Or doting.”

Jaina hummed at that, clearly having no response. She must have used all of her wit up this morning. She leaned forward a little before asking, gently, surprisingly gently, “Are you angry with me?”

“I don’t know,” Sylvanas answered. “I am angry about some things. I wish you had told me sooner, and directly. I wish I had thought all this through before I agreed to the ritual with you, but I have only myself to blame for that.”

Jaina stood and began to walk to the bookshelf to put her book away. “But you did go through with it. I didn’t understand why. Did...did you want children?” she asked, looking briefly back over her shoulder.

“When one generally lives for thousands of years, one tends to believe they will always have time for such things. Later,” Sylvanas said.

Why was she saying this? She had come here to demand answers, not give them.

“But then you didn’t,” Jaina said as she stashed the book and walked back over.

“Then I didn’t,” Syvlanas agreed.

It had never been a thought on the forefront of her mind. Certainly not enough to cause her to fly into an obsession such as Jaina had. Such a mindless, targeted pursuit that intelligence reports of her escapades had recorded it long before the end of the war against the Legion. Sylvanas had ignored them as unimportant then. How relevant they were to her now.

But at the same time, when Jaina had summoned her to the cliffs, and Sylvanas had been warned what it was for, she went anyway. She went alone, as requested. She had told herself it was to find out if this obsession of Jaina’s was going to pose a threat to her or to Vereesa, who seemed so concerned with her former friend. She didn’t have any intention of going through with the ritual.

Until she did.

Jaina was standing in front of her when she laughed again. “And then you adopted a few thousand undead as children instead.”

“They needed a leader,” Sylvanas defended. She ripped the last of the feathers from the bird. The tail feathers. She set them aside to cut up and use for fletching later. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Why did it work?”

Jaina moved in a flourish of robes and skirts, settling herself down on the floor next to Sylvanas. “If you can believe it, I have been tryin g to answer that question for the last few months. To understand what I’ve done to myself,” she said as she started gathering the scattered feathers of the pheasant and tucked them into a neat pile. 

Which Sylvanas slid the tail feathers out of. “Keep these aside, please. What did you find out?”

“For what?”

“About why the Aranal’dorei worked?” Sylvanas asked again.

“No, the feathers,” Jaina said as she pointed to the items in question.

“Arrows,” Sylvanas left it at that. “You were saying?”

“You say that word so much better than I can. Anyway, yes, for the ritual. To make a long story short, all I have are guesses. It seems that the incantation focuses more on the connection between the individuals, rather than the state of their existence at the time,” Jaina told her. She continued to sweep up the feathers with her hands, but left the long green tail feathers alone.

“But that connection--”

“Is tenuous at best, I know. I knew even then. I was desperate,” Jaina admitted.

“And you are certain that my undeath has no...ill effect?” Sylvanas ventured to ask.

Jaina cast her eyes down to the pile of feathers before her, fussing with it a bit as she answered, “Not entirely. But as you well know, undead things have a tendency to remain stable. To return to their status quo, or to just decay, if they change at all. I can assure you that whatever the ritual has given to me is...growing.”

“That is some comfort, I suppose,” Sylvanas said. Her voice softened in a way that she hadn’t felt the need for in a while. Somehow it didn’t seem right to speak any louder than this, with Jaina sitting next to her. So close to her.

Jaina dared a look back up at her, then the sack that sat on the floor on the other side of Sylvanas’ knees. “So what are you insisting on making me then?”

That was an easier thing to answer. Sylvanas tried to ground herself in it for a moment. In the list of things she’d sought that day, after leaving the tower before. 

She rolled the contents of the sack out onto the floor. Carrots. Ginger. Salt. Parsley. A bag of wild rice. “Soup,” she explained. 

“Will you let me help?” Jaina asked her.

“Provided you know how to peel vegetables,” Sylvanas conditioned.

Jaina took a carrot as if offended. “I am surprised that you do.”

“I was just a ranger for quite some time before I was the Ranger General. Before I was the Queen of the Forsaken, and before I was named Warchief. I have peeled more vegetables than days you have been alive,” Sylvanas informed her. 

“Fair enough,” Jaina relented, without trying to defend herself. She merely set about producing a small knife from her belt and proved her skill rather than brag about it.

Sylvanas, of course, knew better. She knew that Jaina had spent her time away from Dalaran living on the fringes of various societies. At least, she had read the reports about those times when she stormed off before. Jaina was disguised more often than not. Posing as barmaids and fortune tellers and everything in between. If she didn’t know how to rid a carrot of its skin properly, she wouldn’t have been able to pull that off.

“If you could also make some water appear in that pot, it would be preferred to me hauling it up the stairs,” Sylvanas requested.

“Is there even a clean water source here?” Jaina questioned as she waved her hand and the iron pot sloshed full of water.

“No,” Sylvanas replied after a moment of realization. She shook her head as she produced her own knife and began to butcher the pheasant. She had had the decency to gut it before she climbed the tower, at least. Now all that was left was cut it into pieces. 

They worked silently for a while. Then Jaina said, “If you have more questions…”

“In time,” Sylvanas cautioned. She did have more questions. So many more. None that she felt comfortable asking right now. No, the silence was easier. It allowed her to think. She needed more time to think about all of this. “Cut them into thin slices,” she said as she noticed Jaina was nearly done with the carrots.

She dumped the chunks of pheasant into the pot and swung it over the flames. Fire. Fire again with her. No, wait. It was cold outside. Right. Jaina would need the warmth.

Warmth, food, and shelter. Living was such a tiring thing. One was always in need of something or another. Sylvanas had nearly forgotten. 

But not nearly enough.

She set about peeling the ginger herself, glancing over as Jaina sliced the carrots and tossed them into the pot when they started to become too much for her to hold in one hand. 

“Never had ginger in soup,” Jaina said, merely observing, not complaining. “Maybe in Pandaria. I’m not sure.”

“It’s for nausea. Calms the stomach,” Sylvanas told her as she began to shave off curls of the spicy root. 

“Do elves get morning sickness?” Jaina asked.

“My mother did,” Sylvanas said. That was all she knew for certain. “Worse with Vereesa than any of the rest of us, or so she claimed.”

“Seems fitting,” Jaina agreed as she finished off the last of the carrot and tossed it into the pot. “Thank you, then. For thinking of that.”

Sylvanas stood and found a bowl on a shelf by the fireplace. Neither the shelf nor the bowl had been there that morning. There were new curtains on the windows too. The plaster of the walls had been patched up slightly, but Jaina had kept Anya’s flower nests. She must have liked them.

Into the bowl went the ginger, the salt, and the parsley in three separate piles. Sylvanas hesitated for a moment, then handed the bowl to Jaina.

And received a lift of one of those short brows in return as she took it. 

“You should season it. I can’t taste anything anymore. Let it cook down for two hours, then put in the rice for another half an hour. Be mindful of the bones. They’re left in for flavor, not for eating,” Sylvanas instructed.

“Are you leaving then?” Jaina asked her.

She had planned to. She was half of a mind to just give the food to Jaina and let her deal with preparing it. Or at least she was when she’d first arrived. Nevermind the awkward trip she’d made to Silvermoon that day, to shoot the bird in Eversong and to find what she needed to accompany it in the Bazaar. Nevermind the green grocer that sold her the rest of the ingredients, not daring to question why the Warchief of the Horde was at his stall, tsking over the state of his carrots. 

Nevermind that she remembered the recipe from her childhood. From the same day that her mother had lamented to her that her baby sister was truly the worst of all of her children yet. From the day that her father had insisted he knew how to help with all of that, and made his own way to the green grocer, and shot his own bird.

“I have matters to attend to,” Sylvanas said as an excuse for herself.

“I...that’s fine. Good. I expect you do. I have more questions for you as well. In time, though,” Jaina told her.

Sylvanas turned to go. “In time, Proudmoore.”

“You may as well call me Jaina, all things considered,” Jaina said to her back.

Sylvanas didn’t know what to call even herself in that moment, much less someone else. She said nothing more as she hurried down the stairs and left the tower.


	2. Questions and Answers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh. Just...ugh.

Undeath pervaded her magic like an odor. It clung like so much cold, heavy moss on the north side of an ancient tree. If Jaina were paying attention, though, and not still groggy with sleep or a distinct lack thereof, she would sense that this odor was slightly different from the one she was expecting. But her focus was--as it had been for most every morning in a while now--on trying to keep her nausea at bay. It was not on detecting which undead elf was at her door, but only on acknowledging that there was one, and allowing them to pass the wards.

Perhaps Sylvanas had more ginger. That would be welcome. It hadn't really helped, but that hardly mattered. Hell, even the confounding distraction of her presence would be welcome. Even if that meant she would have to get up in order to receive it.

Instead, Jaina was met with a different hooded elven head peeking up from the staircase. 

"Well now," a voice came along to go with her, haughty and elven and slightly annoyed, but most of all, intrigued. "Not the rat I was expecting. Not at all. But I suppose the Dark Lady's warning makes sense now."

"Who are you?" Jaina croaked out from her bed. She sat up and reached for the staff she'd left resting against the frame.

"I'd ask the same of you, Lady Proudmoore, but you are fairly obvious even with that bed head. You stink of arcane like no one else can. I am Anya. You took my tower," the dark ranger explained as she fully mounted the stairs, glowering from them as only an undead elf could. All red eyes and an air of superiority.

"I apologize. I was told it wouldn't be a problem," Jaina offered, keeping a firm grip on her staff as she swung her legs out from under the covers and tried to fight off the vertigo that followed.

"And I was told that rats had made this place unsuitable. I then reminded dear Sylvanas that it's Vorel that can't stand rodents, not me. Then I was told it was one very large rat that could and would blast me into very tiny pieces if I did not leave well enough alone. But as you can see, I am prone to insubordination and rather lacking in a healthy fear of my second death," Anya explained.

"I see that," Jaina acknowledged. She knew vaguely of Anya Eversong. One of Sylvanas' trusted lieutenants. SI:7 categorized her as 'odd, but occasionally cooperative'. Odd was certainly a word.

"But I am still in one piece," Anya reminded her.

"Provided you don't come any closer, I am content to allow you to remain whole," Jaina said, trying to sound like the threat she very well could be. Well, if she didn't have to cradle her head in her free hand to steady herself, maybe.

"You don't seem as though you are quite capable of ripping me apart right now, but that's fine. My curiosity is satisfied. I was just here to snoop, and to understand why I am being told to have a watch placed on the very tower that was stolen from me," Anya reported, a smirk as evident in her voice as on her lips.

"I am not entirely surprised to hear that," Jaina informed her, feeling well enough now to look up at the elf again.

"I suspect not. I love what you've done with the place, by the way. Very homey. Very human," Anya commented as she looked about at all the furnishing Jaina had either conjured for herself or teleported in from previous hideaways. "Very much the signs of someone who intends to stay for some time. I'm still not sure why that is."

"I kept your flowers," Jaina noted, avoiding the implied question.

Anya's crimson gaze darted to the wall, where the bunches of dried wildflowers still dotted the cracks in the plaster. Jaina had found them pretty, and in a way, relatable. Beauty covering fragility. Creativity masking destruction.

"You may keep them, then," Anya nodded. "With a promise to me that, should you decide to venture out of this tower, you might signal me and mine in some way that you mean no harm."

"How?" Jaina asked. It seemed a sound request.

"Hold three fingers up, like this," Anya demonstrated with one arm high above her head.

"And what does that mean?" 

"Don't shoot," Anya answered with a grin.

"I did not come here with the understanding that I would be a prisoner," Jaina said as she leaned on the staff and stood up from the bed. A rage threatened to burn away any sense of discomfort that would have kept her seated otherwise.

How dare she? How could Sylvanas do this to her? She thought she would understand...or at least treat her gently, all things considered.

"Which is precisely why I am telling you how to leave without getting shot full of arrows, should you choose to," Anya informed her, her grin vanishing as soon as she had heard the growl in Jaina's voice.

"Oh, I...I'm sorry. I misunderstood," Jaina said, feeling the anger leave her as quickly as it came, and the residue of nausea that came back after it left, along with a tinge of shame at how easily she came to the previous conclusion. "Did Sylvanas send you to tell me this?"

"No, though if she thinks hard enough about it, I suspect she will assume I stopped by," Anya told her, relaxing into a smirk this time.

"And she would tolerate that?" Jaina wondered, genuinely curious. 

The authoritarian, cunning, and sometimes sinister persona of the Dark Lady was falling apart piece by piece with every hour she spent here. It was rather fascinating to find out that, at least among those whom she trusted, Sylvanas Windrunner was much more of a gentle soul than otherwise portrayed.

"I don't give her a choice otherwise," Anya boasted. 

"I see," Jaina noted again, carefully filing the idea away that this one was wont not do as told. News of her residency here was bound to be common knowledge in the Undercity by dusk at this rate. Fantastic. Just what she wanted.

Hopefully the Forsaken policy of relative diplomatic isolation would extend to her. At least that much Jaina could wish for, or could hope that Sylvanas would enforce, right?

"On that note, I was never here and should be going," Anya said with a strange little salute as she began to slip back toward the stairs.

"Wait," Jaina stopped her. "I have a better plan for you."

"I'm listening," Anya nearly purred, intrigued as she stood stock still on the top step, waiting for Jaina to go on.

She would wait a while longer as Jaina made her way over to the hearth, and scooped up the pile of pheasant feathers she'd put onto the mantle for safe keeping. She then walked, slowly and steadily, still leaning on her staff more than she wanted to, over to the steps, and held out her prize to the dark ranger.

"Tell your Dark Lady that the rat said she forgot these. Something about arrows. It seemed important to her at the time," Jaina instructed.

Anya received the feathers in the palm of her black leather glove. The first two fingers were missing from it. Right. Archery.

"You don't understand the point of the game, Lady Proudmoore," Anya said as she turned over one of the longest feathers between her thumb and forefinger. "It's that Sylvanas knows we are prone to do as we please, but expects otherwise. And now you want me to admit to it, and bring her evidence?"

"If you are to be watching me and reporting to her, then I would have all parties involved feel free to...communicate, as it were," Jaina told her.

Anya heaved an entirely unnecessary sigh, but clutched the feathers tightly in her fist all the same. "Fine then. Spoil my fun. Take my tower. A rat you are indeed. Why is she keeping you here anyway?"

"That will remain between her and I, thank you," Jaina answered. Firmly. Resolutely. Steadily. All of the undead world was due to find out she was here, but they most certainly did not need to know why. 

And she did not need to let her face show the way her stomach threatened to betray her for the third time that morning at the very thought of that. No. She could do that much.

"Not even a hint?" Anya pressed and began toying with the feathers again.

"Not unless you wish to change my mind about rendering you into a fine mist. And for that matter--" Jaina didn't get to finish that thought, as the next word turned itself into a dry heave.

So much for all that.

Anya merely watched her struggle to regain her composure with ears pricked forward and her head cocked slightly to the side, like a bird considering the size of a worm it was about to snatch from the ground.

Thankfully, for Jaina's sake, she had nothing left in her stomach to throw up, due to earlier struggles that had kept her bed-bound this late in the morning. So much for that soup from last night, as good as it had tasted going down. But unfortunately, Anya was grinning again, grinning and eyeing her up and down in the simple nightgown she hadn't bothered to change out of yet. Simple and perhaps a little too clinging, too revealing in the way that it pulled across her middle.

"My, my. What have you done to yourself, Lady Proudmoore?" Anya asked with a knowing sneer in her words.

"I have made some very questionable decisions. Now, please go, before I rethink the latest one," Jaina tried very much to sound commanding as she waved Anya off and made haste back to her bed.

\---

"Delivery," Anya dragged out the word in a drawling, singsong note. 

Sylvanas looked up from her work, unamused at the smile on her ranger's face. "Tell me you didn't go hunting for rats."

"I won't lie to you," Anya said with a shrug as she placed something down on the desk that stood between them. 

Pheasant tail feathers. Shit.

"I thought your rat was all but about to invite me to stay for tea, until she nearly puked all over my boots," Anya went on as she shaped the feathers into a design across the polished wood. "That tends to spoil the mood of any conversation, so I understand."

"Anya," Sylvanas started, trying her best to stay calm, dipping into the numb spot that had been left behind in her fury at the world itself.

"Why is there a pregnant Jaina Proudmoore in my tower?" Anya asked plainly.

"It's not your tower," Sylvanas reminded her through grit teeth.

"Why not Velonara's or Clea's?" Anya pouted.

"She wanted that one," Sylvanas informed her, but offered no further truths as Anya leaned on the desk, her body language begging for more.

"I've been thinking about it on the walk back down. What you could owe her. What she might owe you. But what could she offer you? She's disgraced. A woman who lost her city, then her credibility, and now apparently her sanity. Why would you shelter her?" Anya pressed again, leaning so far forward that her shadow hung over the paperwork Sylvanas had been bent over herself, blocking out the dim light of the sole lantern that hung from the ceiling of her office.

Sylvanas stood. The chair beneath her shrieked out a protest as it slid back so violently across the stone floor. It was loud enough to cause both of their sensitive ears to wilt for a moment. Just a moment, though, before Sylvanas was face to face with Anya, trying her best to stare daggers into the other woman’s similarly-fractured soul.

But that was hard to do with someone who had known her from childhood, from before both of their deaths, let alone when it was that imp Anya, of all people. 

Still she seemed to get the message. Sylvanas added to it with a growl, fangs bared in a way that another elf would understand to be quite serious, “Leave it alone, Anya. Follow your orders. Do not question them.”

Anya backed off with her hands raised, but a smile still on her face. “Fine, fine. Can I have the old bell tower then?”

“I don’t care,” Sylvanas told her. 

It was true. She didn’t have time for the games her rangers still played with one another. The upper ruins were split into territories over which alliances were made and tiny wars were fought on the regular. They’d even declared territory for Nathanos, who otherwise refused to participate--an outhouse, that was somehow still standing behind an old church. Sylvanas allowed them their amusements, provided they didn’t result in any actual deaths or injuries. The Valkyr did not work for free, after all.

Unfortunately for Sylvanas, out of all of them, it was Anya who took these battles most seriously.

“Can I say that you said I could?” Anya asked again. “For poor Loralen’s sake?”

Sylvanas sighed, head drooping over her desk as she moved to sit back down. “Fine.”

“Then my lips are sealed and my mind put at ease,” Anya assured her, though there was no such thing as an assurance with that one. 

Sylvanas knew better. “And I don’t have to stress how important it is, then, that you continue that way?” she added for good measure. “And that you do not go rat hunting again?”

“I understand,” Anya said as she made for the door. 

Sylvanas shook her head at her briefly as she collected the feathers into a neat pile and set them aside on the corner for her desk. She would much rather keep at her paperwork than deal with all of this, any of this. Paperwork made sense. There were lines to sign, seals to emboss, orders to be given and actually followed. What a concept.

“Thanks again, daddy,” Anya snickered as she shut the door.

She’d switched to Common for the last word. Thalassian didn’t have anything half as vile in it. Sylvanas had half a mind to rip the damn door off its hinges and go after her for it. But that wouldn’t solve anything. Not with Anya. Not about any of this.

She simply went back to approving plans for new supply lines, and working on other things that she could actually control. And maybe ruining a few pages with ink blots as she gripped her quill a little too tightly for the next hour or two.

\---

"Am I to understand that these visits are going to be regular?"

It was strange, being up here in the light of day. Even as dusk threatened on the western horizon, Sylvanas could almost see a vestige of the Lordaeron she remembered from the windows. A place she knew from attending diplomatic visits and military summits in her youth, where Alleria would make fun of the blocky buildings and muddy streets to her in whispers, and their mother would scold them, but with a smile.

But as for the question, Sylvanas didn't know the answer herself. She was back in the tower top room, with a paper-wrapped package in hand, noting that the furniture had changed again. The bed had moved away from the windows. A desk, along with a matching chair, now occupied a corner closer to the hearth.

From it Jaina looked up at her and asked yet another question, "Or do I owe the honor to the fact that I didn't blast Anya to bits?"

"I wish you would have, so no," Sylvanas lamented as she dared to take a step further up into what was clearly, and quickly, becoming Jaina's sanctum. 

"Your dark rangers always seemed so serious and threatening until now," Jaina said as she seemed to dismiss whatever challenge she was about to issue and turned back to the notebook she had been scribbling in.

"Anya is...Anya, but she could still kill three men from a hundred feet off before the fourth one noticed," Sylvanas felt the need to inform her. 

She took stock of further changes as Jaina hummed her acknowledgement of that fact. The chaise lounge had been banished to the side of the room in favor of two armchairs that now sat before the hearth, with a low table between them. Perhaps the question about her visits being repeated was a request?

Or perhaps not, as Jaina didn't seem inclined enough to stop whatever she was doing to address that.

"I came to ask you if you required anything that you could not provide for yourself," Sylvanas started as she set her package down on the low table and stood to face Jaina. "Supplies, or perhaps a healer."

"Your undead priests would do me no good right now, and we both know it," Jaina quickly snapped back, finishing whatever she was writing with an annoyed flourish as she turned around in the desk chair. "Plus I hear you have already taken it upon yourself to provide me with a bit of a guard detail."

"You wanted to be concealed here. More eyes watching your back will make that easier on all parties," Sylvanas defended.

Nevermind that Jaina had put this upon herself the moment she insisted upon occupying the not so abandoned ruins. She would have been watched without it being so ordered, or even if Sylvanas ordered her not to be watched.

"More like more eyes to keep you informed," Jaina scoffed.

"Do not forget that, circumstances aside, I would be housing a legendary Archmage here with a more recent tendency for rash actions. Your reputation for peacemaking is not the only one you have these days. I have to protect me and mine, in all ways," Sylvanas told her, adding the last part quietly.

"And if I don't particularly appreciate it and want to leave?" Jaina dared. She shut her notebook and stood, waiting for an answer.

"You are free to do so, but I will watch you still. For reasons entirely unrelated to the safety of the Undercity or to preserving the covenants of the current treaty between the Alliance and the Horde. I am afraid that is now unavoidable for you."

Because as much as she didn't want to hold Jaina here, knowing what she did now, it would make everything much easier if she stayed. Because as strange as all this was, as maddening as the circumstances were--so different from any she would have chosen for herself, if given any real choice--Sylvanas had finished her thinking. She knew what she was going to do.

Now she just had to make sure that Jaina agreed with it.

Jaina, to her credit, did not fight back against that notion. She sighed deeply, with a weary shake on her breath as she said, "I suppose you are allowed that much. But I do not wish to leave quite yet. I only wish that you might tell me if you make any further decisions that involve me."

"I would ask the same of you," Sylvanas replied, hoping that Jaina understood the implications of that small statement.

Implications that she was still struggling to wrap her head around. Sylvanas had always thought herself a rational person. Maybe a little cocky and hot-headed, but rational. She could power her way through many situations with logic. 

The fact that Jaina Proudmoore was carrying her child was not one of them.

"I will try," Jaina said. She stepped closer to the hearth. 

She looked utterly exhausted. There was little color to her skin, and her eyes were sunken in and drooping. 

“You seem out of sorts,” Sylvanas noted.

“I’ve...had a bit of a rough night, and morning. A little bit into the afternoon too,” Jaina admitted. “I’m sure Anya told you as much.”

“Is this a frequent occurrence for you then?” Sylvanas wondered. She didn’t honestly know what was and was not something of concern here. Her memories of her mother and siblings served only as fuzzy, emotionally charged flickers, not as the encyclopedia she needed them to be. 

Plus, who knew what humans did with all of this anyway? If things were any different for them? Sylvanas most certainly did not.

“I’m fine,” Jaina answered without actually providing an explanation. 

Her expressions were so hard to read. A slight crease between her brows. Lips in a flat line, the corners quirking ever so slightly downward. There was so little to go off of.

"It occurred to me today that you took an essence of suffering from me, and that this might have changed the spell--"

Jaina cut her off. Again. "Let me stop you there. The answer is no, it did not. The essence is merely the powerhouse of the spell, not a determiner of its outcomes. That's how I knew it was interchangeable. And I assure you it has nothing to do with how miserable I may or may not be."

Sylvanas was not used to being cut off. She was not used to not knowing the answers or at least being informed enough to guess. She was not used to many aspects of this conversation. 

"You've certainly done your research," was all she could think to respond with.

"To an extent I don't even want to try to explain," Jaina sighed as she sought out the comfort of one of the armchairs. "And I am still doing it. I know you have no reason to place any trust in me, but trust that I will tell you if I think I’m dying, or anything like that."

"How comforting," Sylvanas said. 

Jaina's statement about her research was already quite evident to the observing eye. The notebook on her desk was just one of many. The rest were stacked in a pile on the corner of said desk, rife with notes of different colored paper sticking out of them. A book with it's spine turned outward was among them, just close enough that Sylvanas could still read the title embossed there. It was in Thalassian, of course. Ancient Rights and Rituals of the Highborne.

"As for me needing anything, well, you can probably guess my answer there is also no," Jaina told her as she gestured to the room, looking now as cozy and as cluttered as any human mage tower might. 

"I assumed you would subsist on your magic," Sylvanas informed her as she rounded the side of the opposite chair and stood next to it. "But as someone who ate plenty of conjured food in life, when such things were necessary, I know it isn't always preferable to the real thing."

She tilted her head ever so slightly to the package on the table, hoping Jaina would get the hint.

And she did. Jaina shot one brief, but curious glance Sylvanas' way before untying the twine that held the paper together and revealing what was hidden beneath it. 

Sweet rolls, covered in a sticky honey glaze. One row of which were coated in flaked almonds, and the other topped with candied orange slices.

These Sylvanas had sent Velonara to fetch for her, at least, lest talk of her visits to various Silvermoon markets start to make the rounds. And these particular rolls were at least something she could make an easy excuse for. Well, somewhat of an excuse.

"My people believe that houseguests should be treated with respect and offered certain things in hospitality," Sylvanas explained herself. “Something like this is traditional.”

"I am guessing you mean in elven culture, not Forsaken, since I don't see any mushrooms or poison here," Jaina noted as she poked at one of the rolls.

"I thought that obvious," Sylvanas replied.

"Then sit down already," Jaina demanded, pointing to the other chair as she tore off one of the rolls.

And surprisingly, took a bite of it without further protest or questions.

Sylvanas was not used to being demanded of. But still, she sat. Stiff-backed and only on the very edge of the chair, but she sat.

"So, a houseguest, huh?" Jaina said after she swallowed. 

"I have a very large house," Sylvanas offered in explanation.

"And another very large summer home in Durotar," Jaina noted. She eyed the roll in her hand. "I haven't had elven sweet bread for years now. Not since Dalaran, and even then, I thought it a bit sickly. But you're not wrong, it's better than mana biscuits."

“I can only hope,” Sylvanas said with a small nod.

“I’d insist we share it, but you don’t seem to eat,” Jaina said before taking another bite. 

“No need for it,” Sylvanas dismissed that thought before it could be pried into further. 

“You don’t have to keep feeding me, you know,” Jaina told her, even as she was already eyeing a second roll before the last bite of her first was gone. “As I said before, I have been taking care of myself as I should. Or at least, as my body allows me to.”

At this, Sylvanas found she could lean back into the chair a little. Just a little. “You have been friends with my little sister, and before that Prince Kael’thas. You can obviously speak and read Thalassian. I trust that you know enough about us to understand that elves, at least living ones, eat a great deal. Good hospitality, Lady Proudmoore, is one of the most important things to us, and the root of that is always food.”

“That, and you are now suddenly very invested in my health,” Jaina said, blunt and flat as anything. 

She ate the rest of the roll while Sylvanas tried to think of a way to play that off. 

She couldn’t. And honestly, she wasn’t here to talk in circles all night. “I thought I made it pretty clear last yesterday with my actions. Perhaps you are a woman of words then. Let me dismiss any uncertainties you might have. I intend to help you, should you let me. I wish to do so because you are telling me this child is half mine. Because of that, I wish to see it born, healthy and living, if such things are truly possible.”

It was Jaina’s turn to sit forward. Darkness threatened from the edges of the tower windows. The hearth fire reflected in her eyes. Red on blue again, just like the swirling torrent of magic and fire that had started all of this.

“And would you tell it, then, that the Banshee Queen of the Forsaken is one of it’s mothers?” Jaina asked after a few moments.

“I have no intention of lying to her. Though it seems maybe you do,” Sylvanas noted as she found herself hovering again, her body rigid and taut, ready to stand or fight or just do something.

Instead of goading her on further to take that action, Jaina’s expression immediately changed. Without ears it was hard to tell, but Sylvanas might venture to call it a softened state of confusion. “Her?”

“It can only be a girl. The ritual takes only what it is given,” Sylvanas explained. “Did your books not tell you that?”

“I...no. No they didn’t,” Jaina puzzled. “Are you certain?”

“To the point where I know a few women who were a result of such a thing, yes.” And she did. Not many, but some. She was certain that one of her dark rangers was. Several cadets from her days in officer school as well. It was a very normal thing, though, to have two parents of the same sex, so much that it had never stood out in her mind to ask anyone how they were conceived.

Due to their long life spans, elves rarely produced children. There was simply not an older generation in need of constant replacing. And when they did? Well, there were options. There always had been options, to the point where Sylvanas was certain that the Night Elves likely had their own version of Aranal’dorei that dated back to before they banished the Highborne. 

There was even a version for two men that involved a surrogate, and a blood sacrifice. A messy thing, but fitting, as it would only produce boys.

“Everything I’ve read only said child,” Jaina told her, still looking befuddled.

And Sylvanas had to admit that it was nice to be the one who knew what she was talking about again. “You will find that child is a highly overused and generalized word in Thalassian.”

Jaina offered nothing in response to that. She only stared into the fire. 

“Were you hoping for a son, for some reason?” Sylvanas had to wonder.

“No. Somehow knowing that just made it a little more real,” Jaina answered, turning away from the flames to face her. 

“More so than being sick every day?” 

“Not every day,” Jaina countered.

Sylvanas eyed her suspiciously. 

“Just most days. Also it’s supposed to get better at some point,” Jaina told her. She took a deep breath, steadying herself again into a slouching weariness. “So you do want to be a parent then?”

There it was. Finally. The question she had been asking herself. The answer she had taken until now to arrive at. 

She had not agreed to Jaina’s first request of her out of pure whim. That was just what she told herself to make it easier to shrug off, especially when she had thought it didn’t work. Sure, it had been an impulsive decision, but it had been hers to make. 

Sylvanas, too, very much wanted something that was truly hers. 

“Like it or not, I am one already. And I have decided that I would be remiss if I didn’t look at this as an opportunity. I do not know what your plans are for the future. I would normally say that I would not care what they were. But, I do. I care because you are excellent at reigning in the rest of the foolhardy leadership of your Alliance, and they would be lost without that, but mostly because I would like to know my daughter, and for her to know me.”

The words were so strange, coming out of her mouth. Double-toned with a voice of both body and spirit. A banshee. A cold, dead thing. An echo of a woman, who had thought more than a few times about her legacy when she yet lived. Who mostly worried about how she would go about continuing it, but decided that was a topic best left for another day.

Another day that had come, somehow, after she died. After she had given it up as another part of that life she would never visit again.

“I hadn’t thought you would feel that way.” Jaina was looking down now, at the burgundy rug that she’d conjured to cover the floor here. She wrung her hands together for a moment before she continued, “I honestly hadn’t thought much about you at all, until I needed some place to go.”

“No time like the present,” Sylvanas said, falling back to her usual smug sneer, hoping that it would hide the genuineness that she had exposed, for just a moment. 

A moment too long, really. It left her feeling raw and bruised, like salt pressed into an open wound. A feeling that still had all the same sharpness to it as it ever had.

Jaina had graceful fingers, for a human. They counted out against her knuckles for a few beats, weaving a spell that had no magic to it, just a prayer of buying time. “What would you do if I tried to stop you? If I kept her from you?” she finally asked, eyes still on the ground.

“Whatever it took,” Sylvanas answered. Quickly. Easily. Without question, and as ruthlessly as she would command any battle.

“I see,” Jaina said, looking back up at her and searching her for a moment with those tired eyes. “I don’t know if I could. Seeing now that you feel this way. Hearing it from you. I just--it’s unexpected, that’s all. You always seemed so cold. I didn’t think it would matter to you.”

“You said it yourself, Proudmoore. You hardly know me,” Sylvanas told her. “You know the Banshee Queen of the Forsaken, the Warchief of the Horde. You may have heard of the Ranger General of Quel’thalas that she was before. But you haven’t yet had the occasion to meet Sylvanas Windrunner.”

“Adopter of zombies, novice chef, purveyor of traditional baked goods,” Jaina added with an exhausted, hollow laugh. “No. I guess I haven’t really.”

She wrung her hands just once more, then stuck one out.

Sylvanas regarded it for a moment, but made no move to take it.

“If you will continue to help me, but still respect my boundaries, I will not fight you. I will not keep you away, unless you give me reason to. Now, or after she’s born,” Jaina offered as she reached further toward her.

Sylvanas took her hand and shook it. Despite the current circumstances, she realized that it was the first time they’d ever touched. Shaking hands was a very human gesture. In her official capacities with the Horde, she’d only ever offered Jaina an orcish salute from across the table.

Funny how magic could take all the fun out of things.

“Thank you,” Sylvanas said as she pulled away. “Now, you will tell me if you need something, yes? And don’t get proud about it.”

“It’s literally in my name to do so,” Jaina countered, her hand snaking another sweet roll on its way back to her. 

“And here I thought I was supposed to start calling you Jaina.”

A crease in the brows and a smile. Now what was that? “I don’t know. It’s not long enough for you to draw out like it’s hurting you to say.”

Sylvanas let a little laugh pass her lips. Just a short, percussive sound. 

Jaina caught it immediately. “Did you just laugh? And not because someone died?” 

“You will find me capable of many surprising things,” Sylvanas informed her. 

“Interesting,” Jaina said, relaxing into her own smile as she leaned back in the chair and picked an almond off the top of the roll, sticking it between her lips before asking. “I don’t suppose you’re capable of finding real Kul Tiran black tea, are you?”

\---

The tea proved to be an actual challenge. Considering it came from a country that had isolated itself from the world at the end of the Third War, and one that had been previously loyal to the Alliance before that, it was nearly impossible to obtain in any Horde marketplace. 

But after a little over a month of fabrications, of letters drafted from falsified master Apothecaries claiming to wish to study the properties of various teas, of favors called in from importers and black market smugglers alike, Sylvanas was finally carrying a small box of fragrant tea with her to this night’s visit to the tower, along with some round, hard cookies that she was assured were a traditional accompaniment.

She went nearly every night she could. Usually carrying something. Most of the time, it was not anything Jaina had asked for. Most of the time, Jaina didn’t ask for anything at all. Sylvanas made plenty of excuses as to why she would have come into possession of a basket of fresh autumn apples, or tin of fine crackers with a small wheel of cheese to match. Jaina feigned annoyance every time, but ate whatever was brought to her. More often that not, she didn’t bother waiting for Sylvanas to leave to do so. 

She instead would pester Sylvanas with increasingly personal questions between bites, which she could only answer with her own questions:

“Do you remember having any childhood illnesses? Chickenpox or the like?”

“Never heard of it. We didn't keep chickens. Does one get it from handling chickens?”

“Were you born with fangs?”

“What? You weren’t?”

"Do you miss sleeping and eating?"

"Sometimes. Would you trade it for the convenience of not having to worry about either or anything that comes after?"

“How old are you?”

“Are we counting up to when I died or until now?”

She'd managed to talk her way out of answering the last one. Sylvanas had learned long ago that humans were easily intimidated by big numbers, and such things were a topic best avoided, even if any elf worth their salt would have still ventured to call her young.

“What age would you call maturity?” Jaina asked tonight as she mounted the final step of the tower stairs.

Jaina both had and had not changed much in her self-isolation up here. 

Had in that she wasn’t as thin anymore, thanks for several things. The first, of course, being her ever-rounding belly. The second being the food that Sylvanas brought up regularly. And the third being that she wasn’t sick every morning now. In fact, exhaustion had even banished itself from the hollows of her eyes. There was little for her to do here, save to eat and sleep and continue filling up notebook after notebook, as she seemed prone to do. And honestly, that looked good on her.

Hadn’t in that she still had a distracted, flighty air to her. In that Syvlanas could never predict what kind of mood Jaina would be in as she entered her realm. Some days, they would have a pleasant conversation--talking of old times and new, of the goings on in the world as it passed them by. Jaina would ask her for news of those who were dear to her--mostly of young King Anduin--and Sylvanas would give what she knew freely. Other days, though, she wouldn’t say more than a few words. A half-hearted thanks. A grunted answer when her health was asked after. Those days, Sylvanas knew it was better just to leave, rather than to try to talk.

But on the good days, she found that she liked to talk to Jaina. It was refreshing to have someone intelligent, and perhaps a little too intelligent, to speak with. Someone who could keep her on her toes. Someone who was not duty-bound to agree with her. 

Someone who never seemed to be afraid to speak her mind. Good, or bad, though that might be.

“That depends,” Sylvanas answered.

Jaina was at her desk again, which was now a much more cluttered affair. She toyed with the edge of her quill as she stared down at the page of her latest notebook, pondering over whatever she had written there. “I mean when did you consider yourself to be an adult?”

“More things that your books would tell you better,” Sylvanas said as she made her way over to the hearth and searched for the kettle Jaina kept near it. 

It was a good day today. She knew as much already. She would be fine to make herself at home for a bit.

“Just because an anatomy text says high elves are physically mature at thirty-five doesn’t mean that you’d consider that an adult,” Jaina pressed. Though Sylvanas couldn’t see her from this angle, she could hear her start to shuffle her things together into some semblance of organization, to get herself ready to stop her work and settle in for the night.

“No,” Sylvanas said. “Not at all. Forty is the minimum to be inducted as a ranger, though I wouldn’t be seen leaving a recruit that young in charge of anything. For what you’re asking? Triple digits until anyone will take you seriously.”

“Really?” Jaina asked. Her notebook finally snapped closed.

“Elven life is relative to the lifespan,” Sylvanas told her, turning as she heard Jaina approach. “What about you?”

She’d taken to asking the questions back. At first, Jaina didn’t answer them. She made excuses, mostly saying that it wasn’t relevant. Then one day, she’d started answering. Answering to the point where Sylvanas knew things about her now that didn’t come from intelligence reports, for once. That she actually didn’t like seafood much, and was a shame to her maritime heritage. That she was an excellent horsewoman and knew a great deal about the animals. That she regretted now that she didn’t spend much time with her mother when she was younger, particularly when she was pregnant with her little brother. That she could have known the answers to so many more questions if she had done that, instead of going sailing with her father. 

That Jaina Proudmoore, who had for all intents and purposes killed her own father, or at least played a large role in his death, had been a daddy’s girl. And that she missed him still.

“Sixteen or eighteen are typical for human cultures,” Jaina answered.

“Sixteen?” Sylvanas questioned. That couldn’t be right. Sixteen and you’d barely trust a child to be home alone for a few hours.

“Your nephew Arator was that old when he was named a paladin,” Jaina told her. As was becoming their custom, she seated herself in the chair on the right of the hearth, and looked expectantly at Sylvanas to sit on the left.

Sylvanas grunted her disbelief of that as she hung the kettle to boil over the fire and found her place in the other armchair. “I know very little of my nephews. I see they must take after the human side of growing like weeds.”

“I can’t imagine Vereesa brought them around much,” Jaina said with a shake of her head. “Or spoke of you. Giramar and Galadin pester her with questions, though. About you. About everything.”

This had been a new development of the week. Jaina talking about her nephews. Jaina, who knew the boys far better than she did. Jaina, who was far better prepared to raise a hybrid such as they were, thanks all that she already knew.

“Perhaps they take after a friend of hers,” Sylvanas said. A smile came easily to her lips now, and it no longer seemed to surprise Jaina, or send her into a spiral of wondering what Sylvanas might be after from her.

It was just a normal part of their talks now. An almost nightly occurrence. 

“You protest, yet you keep answering me,” Jaina noted. She gestured to the kettle, “And now you’re putting water on. What have you brought today? Are we cooking again?”

They were not. Sylvanas found that she had an urge, more than once, to replicate that first night they’d spent up here. She’d done it a few times now. That was how she found out Jaina didn’t like seafood much, even if she had tolerated trying the fish chowder they’d made. There was just something about it--of peeling potatoes and debating how much of them to put in--that was something of a life forgotten. Something of home and hearth and distinctly different from the days she spent elsewhere, working away in the dank depths in the Undercity, or roaring out her authority in the dusty heat of Orgrimmar.

So Sylvanas smiled again, even though they weren’t doing that. Because she pulled the little box of tea from a pouch on her belt, and displayed it proudly. She’d always liked puzzles. Obtaining this had been a good one.

And Jaina had actually asked for it.

“Is that...really? I nearly meant that as a joke,” Jaina said, reaching for the box all the same.

“I can see why. Your homeland is as isolated as ever, but you’re lucky I enjoy a challenge. The man it was purchased from insisted that these were to go with it,” Sylvanas told her as she reached into another pouch and produced a foil-wrapped column of biscuits. 

Shortbread would be what she could call them. Though her sense of taste left everything like cloying ash in her mouth, she could still smell them fine. Butter and sugar, mostly, as all good things were made of.

Jaina said nothing to that, save to take the roll into her other hand and gawk at it for a moment. Eventually, she croaked out, “These...these were my favorite.”

Her eyes had reddened. Suddenly. And tears caught in the corner for them, threatening to fall.

“Jaina,” Sylvanas said. The name was still so strange on her lips. Especially when it was spoken as softly as that was. As cautiously.

It was just cookies? Why all this?

“Fuck me,” Jaina laughed, wiping away those tears. “Crying over biscuits. Light but I’m a mess anymore.”

“I shall endeavor not to surprise you as well next time, then,” Sylvanas offered.

She realized she had been leaning forward.

She had almost reached out to her. Almost. All this talk of food and family. Of pasts and futures. It was getting to be too much. All of this was more than she’d ever asked for. More than she’d ever anticipated when she stepped into the circle. She too, hadn’t thought about anyone but herself at the time. She too, had only seen it as an opportunity to get something she wanted, even if she hadn’t known she wanted it until then.

Sylvanas had not thought about what it would mean to start suddenly having to care about the well-being of someone else. About what made them happy. About what to do when they were not happy. She hadn’t thought about someone who was not there to follow her orders or curry favor with her.

She hadn’t thought she would actually start to care, or could, for that matter.

And what was most alarming was that this feeling wasn't for the child. Not yet. No. This was for her moody, slightly unbalanced mother, who definitely shed a few more unwanted tears when she had her first sip of the tea. 

\---

It was a bad day. To the point where even Jaina knew this. Some times, she fought against those feelings. But not today. No, today was a day for embracing them.

Still, it didn’t stop Sylvanas from coming up the stairs soon after the sun had set, as she always did. With her ever so mysteriously acquired parcel of food and her concerned eyes. Jaina had never thought the red of them could look soft.

But with her, it was all a game. Jaina knew this. She knew that the shrewd Banshee Queen always had her motives for any action, even the smallest of them. Every kind word, every question came with a reason. A reason that Jaina still puzzled over. A reason she was tired of trying to deduce.

“Still researching?” Sylvanas asked as she stalked up toward the hearth, waiting for her.

Jaina was bent over her notebook, as usual. Research was a word for it, sure. There were days in her youth where she would have killed to have been allowed to just hide away and read for months on end. At first, she had looked at her time here as that vacation that young, studious Jaina had always wanted for herself. 

But now, the tower walls were stifling. Sure, she could leave, but where would she go? Keeping her current appearance would have her instantly recognized, for her face, and instantly questioned, for the state of the rest of her. Maintaining an illusion all day was difficult, even for someone of her skill. She’d done so before, but the exhaustion it brought wasn’t worth it. It also wasn’t worth jeopardizing the very thing she had been working towards now--the life that grew steadily within her.

So yes, she was researching still. Today’s focus had been the side effects of extended magic usage on pregnancy, and for a very specific reason. 

“What else is there for me to do?” Jaina answered with her own question. 

“Hmm,” Sylvanas even drew out her act to seemingly ponder this. “I suppose there’s little else you would want to do up here.”

“Want and need are very different things,” Jaina said plainly. Well, plain to her. Sylvanas, in all her crafting, and control, wouldn’t understand.

It was why she tolerated all of this. The tower. The dark rangers that watched her from afar. The visits that served only to give Sylvanas more information about her, and what her plans might be for their child. 

Plans that Jaina still didn’t really have. Paranoia that some part of her knew was perhaps a little unfounded. But only a little. What killed her, really, and sent her thoughts spiraling this way on days like these, were the things she didn’t know. The truths she couldn’t discern. The evidence that she didn’t have, and couldn’t find in any book that she might have purloined from the various libraries she regularly, and very briefly, teleported herself to in order to build up her collection.

She’d find a way to return all the books later. Somehow. It didn’t matter. She needed them.

“I see.” 

The clipped tone of that haunting dual voice was enough to let Jaina know that Sylvanas had gotten the hint. That her turned back and refusal to come to the hearth to join her were enough.

That she was getting ready to leave.

And somehow, that was also intolerable. 

“What would you do, then, if you could not travel freely for fear of what would happen if you did?” Jaina questioned. She still didn’t turn to wait for her answer.

“Start a revolution,” Sylvanas answered with a self-satisfied sneer in her voice.

Jaina instantly realized that she was talking about her past. About how she had liberated the Forsaken from the Scourge. 

It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t relevant. It wasn’t the answer.

“That’s not my style,” Jaina told her. “But please, do go on about your accomplishments.”

“I meant only to provide some levity to the conversation,” Sylvanas said. Her boots thudded against the planks of the floor as she moved off of the rug and onto the wood. Back toward the stairs. 

She always wore her armor here, as if coming dressed for battle. Some days, Jaina wondered if she ever bothered to take it off. If the constant activity and lack of need for rest made it easier to just keep it on, since she didn’t need to shed it to get comfortable enough to sleep. Other days, she planned for what she assumed would be the eventual deathmatch between them, one day. She noted the gaps at the hips and in the upper arm, and how she might craft an icy dagger to penetrate them.

“It seems you are not in the mood to talk tonight. I’ll leave you to it,” Sylvanas offered as she kept her steady march toward the stairs.

“Don’t you want to hear about my accomplishments as well?” Jaina offered, finally standing from her desk chair to catch Sylvanas’ crimson gaze. “I know a thing or two about revolutions. About reclaiming people and places. Like Dalaran, for example.”

“Let’s not do this,” Sylvanas said, her voice quiet and even. But her ears were flattening back. Even dead and numb as she was, they betrayed her. 

“Why don’t we, though?” Jaina pressed. “We never talk about the wrongs we’ve committed against one another. Sure, they’re somewhat indirect. I wonder what people will say about me when they hear that Jaina the elf killer had herself a half elf baby.”

“I am well aware of what happened in the Purge of Dalaran. And I am well aware of my ability to ignore the subject in favor of keeping my promises to you,” Sylvanas told her. But her ears were getting lower now. Tight to her skull, with their tips near horizontal with the base.

It felt good. It felt so good to see her angry. To see her genuine. A rush and a thrill that Jaina didn’t experience much here, safe and isolated. The fear of it all, of the unknown and what Sylvanas might do if she actually broke and acted on her anger? Now that, that was something.

“Or what will they say about you, whose daughter will also be that of the Lady of Theramore? Theramore, which you stood by and watched Garrosh destroy?” Jaina goaded further.

“I had no choice!”

There it was. A genuine reaction. Sylvanas’ voice filled the room. Just a fraction of a banshee’s scream. Red eyes blazed. The shadows of the room coalesced, just slightly, pulling toward her. 

And then it all stopped as suddenly as it began. Instead, a look of horror flashed over her features before they quickly rendered themselves back into an impassive, neutral mask. Her default expression, but missing the smirk.

“You are not yourself today,” Sylvanas told her. But she was still. She didn’t leave. She didn’t walk away.

“I am myself every day,” Jaina said. “I am myself in every thought and feeling and action I have ever taken. Even the ones that keep me awake at night.”

“A bold statement,” Sylvanas replied. Her ears were leveling out, but seemed to struggle with the action.

“Go ahead. Call me mad. Tell me that I’ve lost that self you’ve so nicely conjured for me from what little you know,” Jaina bade her, walking toward her. “Tell me exactly how it is I should feel, or what revolutions I might start to fix everything.”

“Why do you want that?” 

More questions. Jaina was sick of questions. 

“You agree, don’t you? You come up here with your little gifts because you don’t trust me to take care of myself. You think you’re doing me good by checking in on me. Because the whole world thinks me damaged goods after Theramore, so why not you? You with your spies and strategy.”

It felt good. It felt so good to say it. To let these things out of her head. Sure, it was ill-advised. It was petty and foolish. But Jaina wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t a little bit foolish, now would she?

“Listen to yourself,” Sylvanas said. 

What an actor she was. She’d even managed to control those ears. They were down again, but wilted, as if concerned. As if she didn’t wish to lash out the same way.

“I have nothing left to do but listen to myself,” Jaina told her. 

She’d pulled up short of Sylvanas, hand gripping the railing of the staircase below them. She left just enough room for Sylvanas to be the one to make the decision. To be the one to start the fight.

Jaina just wasn’t sure why she wanted it. Her blood boiled, though. So much so that her grip on the railing was white-knuckled and strong. 

Because she very much needed Sylvanas to stop acting, and to start doing.

“Jaina.”

Her name was soft on the banshee’s lips. Her beautiful, death-chilled features settled into concern. Not anger. Not again. Instead of dissolving into her spirit form, or reaching for the knife she always kept on her belt, Sylvanas reached out to her with one hand. One that, today, wasn’t sporting any sort of clawed gauntlet. It was even bereft of her archer’s glove. In fact, both hands were. Just pale, perfect skin, cold with the grave as it brushed Jaina’s shoulder, one finger straying to where her robe exposed her collarbones.

Jaina swatted it away. “Don’t touch me. I don’t want you to touch me. I want you to tell me what you really think. Tell me how crazy you think I am.”

“No.”

That was all. That was it. Sylvanas said only that word, then swiftly made her way to the steps. 

“Why not?” Jaina screamed down at her, but did not follow.

She didn’t get an answer. 

\---

She wouldn’t get one the next night, or the night after that. 

And that was fine. Jaina was plenty content to stew alone. She didn’t need the company. She got more done without it, rather than ramble on through the evening about nothing important.

But then she’d finished reading up on everything she could related to her latest train of thought. The answer was that, yes, prolonged use of glamor spells was damaging to the caster. And that several other studies agreed that such damage would reflect upon a pregnancy. 

So yes, she was right. Leaving wasn’t really an option.

She could go to Stormwind again, sure. She could pass off questions for a while. But then, yes, the baby would come out with pointed ears and glowing eyes and she would have to answer for it.

Plus Sylvanas would actually be moved to action by such a thing, if Jaina were to choose to keep their child in what still remained an enemy city, even with the treaty that still remained in place between the factions. It was tenuous at best. A temporary thing. As time and time again would prove--the Horde and the Alliance did not work together for long.

And what would it get her anyway? What Jaina missed was the social aspect of her life before, but that hadn’t even been the same since she’d left Dalaran. She had no friends left. No family. No one, really.

And now, not even a sometimes unwanted visitor. A visitor who maybe didn’t really have any ulterior motive. Who maybe didn’t want to fight. Who wasn’t planning to kill her after all this was over. 

Who maybe just brought her things and talked to her to try to make her happy.

It was then that Jaina talked to her daughter for the first time. On that third night.

“I think I’ve made a mistake,” she said. After not having an occasion to speak for days on end, the words stuck in her throat. Her own voice was a foreign, gritty thing.

She was in bed, staring up into the dark recesses of the ceiling for what must have been hours. Sleep refused to claim her. She had her hand on her belly, as she found herself doing by default when it was free. Now more so than ever.

“I think I shouldn’t be alone,” she went on. She ran her hand over the curve of herself through the thin fabric of her night robe. 

Jaina had the luxury of knowing exactly how far along she was. She knew up to the day. She knew everything that the medical texts she’d stolen could tell her. Well, about human development and high elf development. Not a combination of both, but they were apparently very similar.

She knew it would only be a few months now until she wasn’t alone. But that felt like an eternity. 

“I’ve offended her. Your other mother. I think that’s why she isn’t coming back,” Jaina said.

She had replayed those moments out in her head many times. The feeling of Sylvanas’ hand on her shoulder. The burn of eyes that perhaps weren’t trying to seek weakness in her, but maybe to understand her.

Jaina knew that some scholars speculated that babies learned the sound of the parent’s voices while still in the womb. That this was why a mother’s lullaby was more soothing than a strange nursemaid’s might be.

So if she had no one to talk to, she might as well start testing that theory. More research. It was all she could think to do.

“I think I miss her,” Jaina admitted. “What about you?”

\---

Two weeks had passed before she heard steps on the stairs again. 

Jaina even suspected that she might have imagined them to the point where she did not turn to acknowledge the sound. Because she had done so enough in her days alone. She had gotten intimately familiar with every creak of her tower, every distant sound that echoed through the ruined city that only she and the dark rangers inhabited the surface of.

But the second that boots hit the landing, well, there was no mistaking that sound. Light as she could make it. A ranger. A woman who spent a lifetime, and beyond it, valuing her ability to surprise her prey.

And surprised Jaina was. She turned to find Sylvanas standing there, in her full armor again, with a wooden box in the clawed hands of her gauntlets. 

She didn’t say a word. She just offered Jaina an impassive glance, then made her way over to the fire, as she always did before their last discussion.

Jaina watched her as she set the box down on the table, and started to pluck a few items from it. Vegetables. Pearl onions. Carrots. Celery. Unshelled peas.

“It’s been a while,” Jaina finally found the courage to say.

Sylvanas only made a small noise to acknowledge that and kept unpacking her little crate. Potatoes. A rabbit, already skinned and gutted, which she hung from the mantle as she moved to question the state of Jaina’s cooking pot.

“I didn’t think you were coming back,” Jaina prompted as she stood. 

She shut her notebook hastily and shoved it behind the others. She didn’t want to risk leaving this one out. No, it wouldn’t bode well for this conversation if Sylvanas saw what she’d been doing there. Drawings, mostly, of elven ears and delicate features. Of an archer’s shoulders. Of a hand that had only touched her so briefly, before she had slapped it away.

“You made it pretty clear that you didn’t want me back,” Sylvanas said, finding the pot empty, but that there had been water in the kettle. Jaina usually left it there, ready to heat for tea. Tea which she’d long run out of, and had to resort to conjuring an inferior version of instead.

This she poured into the pot, then set about cutting the rabbit into. Her knife was sharp and precise, practiced from obviously doing this so many times before. She sliced through the joints of the creature, and rendered it into smaller pieces with ease.

“You were right, you know,” Jaina said as she started toward her. “I wasn’t myself that day. I was, but I wasn’t.”

“You have your reasons,” was all Sylvanas said to that as she dispatched the rest of the carcass, and moved back to the table where she’d set the vegetables out. 

“You came back, though,” Jaina pointed out.

“Conjured food isn’t very nutritious,” Sylvanas offered by way of explanation. She started to slice the pearl onions in half with her knife before throwing them into the pot.

She only looked up from her work when Jaina got close. As close as they’d been the last time she’d seen her. Close enough for her to reach out and touch her, should either of them so desire.

Sylvanas met her with a challenge in her eyes. But not a fight. A question, really. One that she seemed unable to pose otherwise.

“Be honest with me,” Jaina started, now that she had her attention. “Please. Did you come back here to just make sure I ate something properly to keep your child healthy, or did you come back for any other reason.”

Sylvanas looked at her for a moment. Then another. She then looked down at her hand, slicing the remaining onion in it before tossing that into the pot. She put her knife away, back into the sheath on her belt.

Only then did she give her answer. “It’s been...interesting. Getting to know you. When you allowed me to. I enjoyed it. I was starting to understand why your ritual worked. Why it deemed us worthy.”

“Are you saying you want more of that?” Jaina asked her. 

“You asked me to be honest,” Sylvanas answered, straightening her posture into that austere, military stiffness she so favored. “That is more than most people can request of me without fear.”

“You’re not that fearsome,” Jaina said as she leaned down to take the bag of peas. She sat down in her chair with it, and started to squeeze them from their shells.

“I’m not?” Sylvanas asked. Jaina could hear the little smile in her voice. She needn’t look up to see it.

“No. You let your rangers get away with murder. You still love your sisters. And you are very kind to me, even when I don’t return the favor,” Jaina told her. 

“Jaina--” Sylvanas started. She didn’t reach out to her. Not this time. She had a half-peeled potato in her hands anyway. It would have been doubly awkward.

“No. Don’t start. I don’t want pity. I don’t want you to tell me I’m crazy. Not anymore. I want what you want. I liked our evenings, Sylvanas. I missed them.” Jaina continued to strip the peas from their pods, even as her hands started to shake a bit with those words, but mostly, with the truth of them.

I missed you was still a lot to say. It was still something she was coming to terms with. Still something she wasn’t entirely sure of.

Was it just company and companionship she missed? Did it matter who it came from? Or was it this thing that they had been building, however strange the foundations of it might have been? Was it the little details of Sylvanas’ life and death that she would occasionally leak from her quizzical answers? Or was it the small facts of her present day that Jaina was learning from the smallest things? The way she carried herself. Her careful choice of words. The little scars on what small bits of exposed skin there were on her, paler still against ashen skin.

“Then we shall continue with them,” Sylvanas said. She went back to peeling her potato. 

Together, they made a rabbit stew that tasted far, far better than anything Jaina had conjured for herself while Sylvanas was gone--spiced with pepper and rosemary, which had been hiding in the corner of the crate. There was even enough left for tomorrow, which Sylvanas added more water to so it could simmer overnight.

They talked for hours. At first, just in bits and pieces. Their conversation was as shaky as that first night. But then it wasn’t. Then it was more.

Sylvanas was telling her about how her ranger squadron would make a stew like this. She was talking about Quel’thalas, unprompted. About how easy rabbits were to find in those unspoiled, golden forests--back when they were still unspoiled, of course.

And Jaina was talking back. She was telling her about Dalaran. About how she’d met her little sister there the first time. And Sylvanas laughed at her description of Vereesa’s dumbfounded face when she found out that Jaina was a member of the Kirin Tor at such a young age, even for a human.

Jaina made up her mind when Sylvanas started to make her way to the stairs. She wanted more. She wanted to be sure.

“I should let you sleep,” Sylvanas said as she walked.

“You don’t have to go,” Jaina offered. She stood and made her way to the bed, but kept her eyes on Sylvanas. 

“But you should sleep,” Sylvanas countered, even as she turned around and watched her. “It’s late.”

“I meant that you could stay until I did, fall asleep that is,” Jaina explained. 

She wasn’t sure why that was something she wanted. But she did. She very much did.

“If you want--”

Jaina stopped her before she herself could question that desire. “You told me once before to ask if I wanted something. I’m asking.”

“All right,” Sylvanas instantly agreed, but then didn’t seem to know what to do about it.

Neither did Jaina, really. But there was a relief there. A sudden weight of not having to spend another night alone, talking to the baby until she could fall asleep, lifted from her. It was a better feeling than yelling out her frustrations, or trying to coerce someone into an argument. Much better, in fact.

But the actual logistics of the situation were something she hadn’t thought of. The tower room had no walls. 

“Can you maybe just...go downstairs for a minute or two while I change, though?” she asked.

Several minutes later, she was in bed. Properly in her night robe, and in bed. And Sylvanas was looking down at her from beside it.

“Do you want me to bring a chair over?” Sylvanas asked, looking about the room.

“You could just sit next to me here. It’s fine, I promise,” Jaina told her, gesturing to the empty space beside her on the bed.

Because for some reason she had obtained herself a double bed. She didn’t have a need for it, but it felt strange to sleep in something smaller. Jaina was used to sleeping alone, but she had this anyway. In a room that she could have crafted exactly to her needs, she’d made herself a big bed and too many chairs for company that she never had. 

Because that’s just what one did. 

Sylvanas looked down at the expanse of quilt between them. She considered it for a moment. Then she started to fiddle with something on her shoulder.

Jaina wasn’t sure what she was doing until the heavy metal of the pauldron adorned it clanked against the floorboards as it fell from her. 

“It would stab your linens full of holes,” Sylvanas explained as she went to do the other one.

It took a while before she could rid herself of everything sharp and metal on her. Beneath all that armor, Sylvanas was smaller than Jaina thought. She was hawkish and wiry in some ways, feline and languid in others. The only part of her that seemed as powerful as her armor portrayed were her shoulders. These were thicker with muscle than the rest of her, a testament to what she was at the time of her death--a soldier, an archer, a woman fighting desperately with every ounce of strength she had.

Jaina learned that beneath all that metal, Sylvanas wore a simple leather cuirass, and a pair of dark-stained doeskin breeches that looked very soft. In these and these alone did she slip onto the bed, above the quilt. She sat there, next to Jaina, smaller than her. She would have been smaller than her still without the baby weight.

“Will you try to sleep?” Sylvanas asked.

She looked as though she hadn’t sat like this in a while. Like the comfort of Jaina’s mountains of pillows and the soft fabric of the quilt were things that were foreign to her. 

“I will try,” Jaina said. And she did. She made her best effort to settle herself, body and mind. And honestly? She was pretty settled. Much more than she had been. 

And when she questioned it, a look in Sylvanas’ direction seemed to answer that. The other woman had settled against the pillows, finally. She stared ahead of herself, unsleeping in the night, but her gaze wasn’t wide-eyed or restless. Thoughtful, maybe. 

That wasn’t what kept Jaina awake. No, it was someone else entirely that was restless.

She shifted a bit. Sylvanas turned to look at her and asked, “Am I keeping you awake then?”

“No,” Jaina told her as she turned to her back. “You’re not.”

“But you’re not sleeping,” Sylvanas pointed out.

“Your daughter is keeping me awake,” Jaina informed her. 

“What do you mean?”

Jaina answered this by simply reaching for Sylvanas’ hand. The same one that she’d slapped away from her last time, she brought towards herself. And Sylvanas let her. She didn’t try to take it away as if Jaina would bite it.

Instead, Jaina settled it on her abdomen. To where their daughter was so rudely kicking at her ribs.

Sylvanas startled at the sensation, almost pulling away, then not. Her hand wasn’t cold through the fabric of the quilt, but it was where Jaina gripped her wrist. But in a tepid way, like a glass of water left out overnight.

“When did this start?” she asked, daring to splay her fingers out more to catch more of the movements.

“While you were gone,” Jaina told her. “Actually, right after I asked her if she missed you.”


	3. Actions and Consequences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jaina Proudmoore invented social distancing and babies are a virus.
> 
> I hope you all are staying safe and healthy out there.
> 
> Thanks for dealing with this fit of strangeness from me. Yuck.

Someone brushing up against a ward was like a knock at a door. Polite. A question, waiting on an answer. A pause in conversation, waiting to be seized upon. 

Someone trying to break through a ward, well, that was like a battering ram. An angry mob trying to get in to lynch the caster. 

Needless to say, Jaina woke instantly at the sensation. She had expected it to be the ward on the door below. Maybe a dark ranger who had even less good sense than Anya, or perhaps another undead citizen seeking to solve the mystery of what Sylvanas kept in the tower above their city.

But instead, the tearing at her defenses came from the roof. The roof, where she had only placed a very weak ward. Just enough to serve as a warning. 

And that warning just winked out. As quickly as it was disturbed, it disappeared, as if consumed whole. Too soon for her to get an idea of who or what was able to destroy it so quickly.

Jaina’s hands were on her staff. Her breath hitched in her chest, once, then twice, as she looked around the darkened tower room. The only light came from the coals burning slowly in the hearth. Just enough to light the immediate area with a soft, cinder orange glow. Outside, the moon hung in a silver sliver over the snow. Winter gripped the ruins, burying them in a light blanket of undeserved purity. Only a few inches, just enough to cover the ground. But even that meek light didn’t reflect anything out of the ordinary.

At least, not to Jaina’s human eyes. Damn. If only Sylvanas were here. If only she didn’t have to spend the next few days across the sea in Kalimdor.

Jaina heard a creak of a distant floorboard, across the room from her. 

“Show yourself,” she demanded. 

She waited one shaky breath, then two. Jaina got to her feet, leaning on the staff she still kept next to the bed for only a moment before she raised it, and sent a bolt of arcane energy in the direction of the sound.

The magic illuminated a path through the room, streaking past her conjured furniture, her stolen books, and finally whizzing past a set of elven ears. But these were still pink and perked with life. And mostly hidden beneath a crimson hood and far too much golden hair that lay trapped beneath it.

The owner of said ears easily dodged her spell, which honestly hadn’t been meant to injure, but more so to act as a warning. If the flash of the side of her face hadn’t given her away, then it was that graceful, dance-like movement.

“Valeera?”

“Well, well. You’re definitely not Anya,” Valeera replied. It was definitely her. That voice--velvety and always approaching a self-satisfied chuckle--could belong to no one else. “And you, Lady Proudmoore, are definitely the last person I expected to find here.”

Wait. Shit. It was Valeera. 

But she had been expecting Anya?

“Likewise,” was all Jaina could think to offer in return.

Valeera did her the courtesy of wandering over the hearth to stand in its meager light. She looked unchanged since the last time Jaina had seen her in Stormwind, all reds and greens and exposed skin--standing out here just as she did there, against the simple stone and plaster and wood tones that dominated the room.

“Please put the staff down, Jaina,” she requested as she looked around the room, then back at her. 

Right. She could see in the dark. At least better than Jaina could. But Valeera wouldn’t hurt her, right? She was Anduin’s. She was loyal to her king and to the Alliance. Well, maybe not completely to the Alliance, but definitely Anduin.

Jaina set the staff back to rest against her nightstand before she could question that any further, but she kept one hand loosely wrapped around it. 

“I am more than happy to, if you tell me why you’re here,” Jaina offered.

“Not to find you,” Valeera told her. “Though I wondered why the roof was warded. Scared my gryphon off before I could break it, so that will make getting out of here fun. Truth be told, I was looking to meet with a contact here.”

“Anya?” Jaina wondered, both to herself and to Valeera.

“Yes,” Valeera answered. “We’ve shared reports before. But I haven’t been in contact with her for a few months. I guess I know why now.”

“Anya is in another tower,” Jaina explained. “I”m not sure which one. One that has a view of this one, I’m sure.”

“I see,” Valeera said, leaning against the mantle. She flipped her long ponytail over one shoulder, away from the embers. “The question remains to me, of course, as to why you are here? I’m sure the answer is very interesting, considering you’re the size of a house.”

She was. For all the threatening posture that Jaina tried to adopt, there was no denying that she was heavily pregnant. A little over seven months, now, by her count.

She let go of the staff, realizing just how ridiculous that must have looked to Anduin’s young spy.

“It’s a long story,” Jaina offered as she did her best to approach Valeera in the most casual manner that the situation allowed.

“I’ve got time,” Valeera told her. “Care to light this up for us a little? Unless you want to keep squinting at me?” She gestured to the coals.

They were a steady blaze again at the snap of Jaina’s fingers. 

“Damn,” was Valeera’s response to that, as she eyed Jaina up and down in the light.

“You’re sure you deserve that answer?” Jaina asked her.

“If you’re worried about who it’ll go to--” Valeera started.

Jaina cut her off with both actions and words. She shook her head as she made her away to her chair by the hearth and sat in it, then said. “You already know enough by looking at me. So what does it hurt to tell you the rest? I can’t stop you from doing what you’re going to do with it. I know it’s pointless for me to try. And if I did, I would only disrupt the peace that we both worked so hard for a few months ago. Why don’t you have a seat?”

“That was...less resistance than I thought you’d put up,” Valeera told her as she took up the offer and flopped down in Sylvanas’ chair.

Since when had it become Sylvanas’ chair? Well, no one else sat there. It’s not like she had other guests. Still. That was a realization that Jaina wasn’t ready for. Not now. Not tonight. Not when she was still trying to calm her nerves from Valeera’s sudden intrusion.

“I don’t have the energy for that kind of thing these days,” Jaina admitted. “But you know what there is to know.”

“You’re knocked up and being hidden by the Forsaken after all but disappearing off the face of Azeroth for months?” Valeera questioned. “That explains some, but not all.”

“I know you’re young, Valeera,” Jaina said as she sunk into the now very well broken-in leather of the chair. “But I also know you are clever. You can figure the rest out for yourself.”

The other woman smirked. Her green eyes sparkled with thought, and her red lips twitched briefly into a full smile before settling back. “I know you’ve been wanting a baby, for whatever horrific reason that anyone might wish such a thing upon themselves. But why here? Why above the Undercity, with my dark ranger contact apparently watching you?”

Jaina offered her an impassive glance. She knew that if Valeera hadn’t already guessed, or even if she would pretend to guess incorrectly, she would know the real answer eventually. It was obvious, really. Jaina could not be here without the blessing of the Banshee Queen.

“I know that you tried to get Vereesa Windrunner to perform an Aranal’dorei with you. I know that she refused,” Valeera continued.

Great. So that embarrassing fact of her life was now making the run of SI:7 and the Uncrowned. Fantastic.

“So, seeing as you probably continued down that path, whose little girl are you having instead?” Valeera pondered, crossing her legs and settling into her chair, putting on a very obviously fake, but thoughtful air.

Again, this answer was obvious if Valeera merely thought through where they were in that moment. There was no point hiding it. Not anymore. But Jaina had other plans for this conversation.

“Is it really that common among the elves that you know all of this?” Jaina asked her in return. Not to stall, but to get a second opinion, really.

“I had two moms, Jaina. It’s pretty damn common,” Valeera told her flatly. “Common enough that we don’t really talk about it. Anyway, I can’t believe you’re having the Warchief of the fucking Horde’s baby and didn’t write home to tell me about it.”

“I…” Jaina tried to think of any kind of explanation for all this. 

She really did. She tried to wrap up the last few months of her life in a way that made sense. She tried to think of how to convey that Sylvanas was nowhere near the monstrous, unfeeling thing that she had once assumed her to be. That she had instead been helping Jaina. She tried to bottle up the desperation and loneliness that had driven her down this path in the first place. But she couldn’t. Not even Sylvanas could fully comprehend that, even with their nights after nights of increasingly more personal and longer conversations.

“Listen. Like you so thoughtfully pointed out, I have eyes, and a brain. I can see what’s going on. I don’t fucking understand it. Not in the least, but that much is obvious,” Valeera said. She looked around at the room. The flower nests. The remnants of Sylvanas’ little gifts--tea boxes stacked on the mantle, cracker tins stuffed with quills, a basket that had been filled with fruit, now home to a neat stack of dishes. “It doesn’t seem like you’re suffering here, or being kept against your will. And even so, it’s you. I don’t think anyone could keep you anywhere you didn’t want to be for long.”

“I’m here of my own volition,” Jaina confirmed. “And I’m guessing that you will be obligated to report that.”

“You know, he’s worried sick about you. Anduin, that is. And Vereesa even put a little bounty out for information on you among my compatriots,” Valeera informed her. 

“Why?” Jaina asked. Vereesa had been so disgusted with her when last they spoke. And she’d made a point of leaving a room whenever Jaina entered it thereafter. 

“Because believe it or not, there are people who still care about you, you know,” Valeera told her. She stood and looked toward the window. “I should go find that gryphon.”

“Wait,” Jaina offered instead, gesturing for her to stop. “I could portal you back. But on one condition.”

Valeera turned to face her again with one eyebrow raised. “Motherhood agrees with you. I half thought you would blast me to bits if I didn’t leave right away.”

“Stop,” Jaina warned. “I’m not blasting anyone to anything. I will send you home and you can do what you have to do. Anduin was going to find out one way or the other. Best he hear it from a friend, and maybe one I can explain myself to a little, if you can give me some time. I just want you to do one thing for me. Well, two.”

“I’m listening,” Valeera encouraged, but still let one of her hands drift toward the daggers on her belt. Maybe subconsciously. Maybe not.

“First, put the kettle over the fire so we can have some tea,” Jaina said as she pointed to the hearth. “And then you’re going to sit back down and tell me about your mothers.”

And then it came. Another bashing against her wards. Though this one was unsuccessful and at the door downstairs. And Jaina was expecting it.

She held up a hand to stop the protest that was still forming on Valeera's rouged lips. "Hang on just a minute."

Jaina conjured herself a little portal to the door of her tower. It was certainly easier than navigating the steps these days. Plus it would let whoever it was see her calmly seated in a chair and decidedly unattacked. It wasn’t large enough for them to come rushing through. Just a little window into the room.

And on the other side of it was a dark ranger that Jaina did not recognize, standing stock still in the snow.

“I’m fine. Call off whatever or whoever you might have summoned,” Jaina told her.

The woman’s red eyes flared with concern. She peered into the portal for a moment longer, unbelieving.

Valeera waved at her.

“I’m serious,” Jaina said to her silence. “What’s your name?”

“Velonara,” she answered. 

Velonara was blonde, petite, and spoke quietly. Well, at least the one word she had uttered so far. Her hood was down, spread like an inky puddle across her shoulders. Whether that was due to the fact that she just didn’t wear it up, or that it might have blown off her head during her run to the tower, Jaina couldn’t be sure. She wore her pale hair almost the same as Vereesa did.

“Velonara, then. Thank you for your concern. My visitor wasn’t expected, but isn’t a threat. I believe she was actually looking for one of your sisters, so you’re probably familiar enough with her to know as much. I understand you have orders to watch over me, but please trust me when I say I’m fine,” Jaina continued to talk her down.

Velonara looked between Jaina and Valeera for a moment longer. She let out a breath she hardly needed to be holding in, then held up her hand in some sort of signal that Jaina didn’t understand. Presumably a sign for anyone else who might be responding.

“We saw your spell, Lady Proudmoore,” she explained. “And before that an Alliance gryphon flying away. I hope you understand our cause for raising the alarm.”

“I understand, but I’m alright,” Jaina assured her yet again. “Please, go about your night.”

Velonara offered her a nod before she turned around, hand still in the air, and began to walk away from the tower. 

Jaina closed her portal.

“Well, if I had any doubts before--” Valeera started.

“Listen, I am very able to make that kettle move itself,” Jaina told her. “But I don’t think that even you are rude enough to deny a request from a pregnant lady. Now? About your mothers?”

Valeera sighed and might have rolled her eyes a little, but she swung the kettle over the fire and sat down.

\---

“Dark Lady.”

Sylvanas was expecting a greeting as she crossed the threshold of the portal, back to the heat and daylight of Ogrimmar, front facing the cool dampness of the Undercity. It was usually a contingent of her rangers. Perhaps some apothecaries. A deathguard or ten.

Not just one, solitary ranger. Certainly not Velonara.

“I received your report, ranger,” she told her. “No need for you to give it face to face.”

Velonara looked properly chastised. At least there was that. She made no effort at a comeback as Sylvanas stepped away, making her way to the Royal Quarter, and the safety of her chambers there.

Perhaps it was for that reason that Velonara followed her, silently. Perhaps what she wanted to say was something that would have to wait to be said behind closed doors. 

But Sylvanas knew of the goings on in her absence. She knew that Valeera Sanguinar had surprised Jaina in her tower and caused quite a stir up in the ruins. She knew that it amounted to nothing more than Jaina dismissing the rangers that came to check on her and apparently Valeera spending several hours there before Jaina herself sent her home.

She knew that, for all intents and purposes, she could count on the leadership of the Alliance being fully aware of what was going on now. Valeera might consider herself without a faction, but it was plain that her loyalty firmly belonged to the house of Wrynn. Her tongue would follow suit, without a doubt.

That should have terrified her. 

But it didn’t. If there was anyone that could be trusted to report the truth of it, to not spin the circumstances in favor of any side or another--or against the other, for that matter--then it was a neutral spy. One that had been key in carrying the messages that had started this current period of peace. One that Sylvanas had already utilized for such purposes before. She had always hated politics, but it turned out that in matters such as this, of shrewdness and statecraft, she had some good instincts. Valeera was one of those.

And thus far, no one had reached out. No threats had been made. No letters sent. Jaina had received no other strange visitors in the night. If anyone was going to take any drastic actions, well, the time for that had already long passed.

If there was one lesson that Sylvanas still valued highly from her days as Ranger General, it was that sometimes, it made more sense to wait and see what would happen, rather than taking action preemptively. To respect the status quo. To hope that things would return to a sense of normalcy. Not every disturbance ripped in waves, like a stone thrown into a still pond. Sometimes, the stone would just sink. 

Sylvanas had a feeling that the waves of this stone would come later, though.

Velonara followed her into her study. She shut the door behind them, making sure that they were both well-aware of it before she came to stand before Sylvanas, offering her a salute from the glory days of Quel’thalas.

“I wanted to apologize--”

“I told you. I received your report. There is little to worry about, and nothing to apologize for,” Sylvanas told her, mildly annoyed that this was the reason she’d dogged her steps the whole way back to her quarters.

Velonara had always been hard on herself. Death, and what came after, hadn’t changed that for her. “I should have insisted that Lady Proudmoore not allow--”

Sylvanas cut her off with a laugh. A little scoff that turned into an almost-snort. The loudness of it even surprised her. “You can’t insist that Lady Proudmoore does or does not do anything. She doesn’t do well with being told what to do. Even so, she is a guest here, not a prisoner. I thought I made that expressly clear.”

“But Sanguinar is--”

“Sanguinar knew what was going on the minute she set foot in that tower. And from what I understand, she dropped in on the roof. Not much any of you could have done about that,” Sylvanas told her.

“She wasn’t looking for Proudmoore. She was looking for one of us,” Velonara said. Eyes that had been straight ahead, searching Sylvanas’ face for something, anything, now cast themselves to the floor.

“And you think that I’m not aware of that as well?” Sylvanas asked. Another scoff. She couldn’t help herself. “I allow her and Anya their correspondence. In fact, I have utilized it many times before, and encouraged it when I first found out about it. Is that what has you quaking on your boots? You think you’re exposing your fellow ranger as a traitor to me?”

Velonara looked up. Her eyes. Her wilted ears. Her trembling brows. These all told the story before she could even speak. “I...didn’t know. None of us did.”

“That’s because the ones that do accompanied me to Orgrimmar for this visit. And I’ve left them there for now to keep an eye on that old fool Saurfang, lest he go starting another war. You are a victim of poor timing, I’m afraid. Please, have a seat. You have obviously been agonizing over this for the last two days,” Sylvanas said as she gestured to the chair in front of her desk.

And they say that the undead do not feel. Sylvanas watched the ranger slump into the chair, drained and drooping. 

Sylvanas gave her a moment to collect herself. She took off her cloak, first navigating her ears out of the hood and then untangling it from her pauldrons. She shook the red dust of the Horde capital from it before hanging it. She made a grand show of it, and only then did she turn back to Velonara.

“All things considered, I’m glad you’re here. I meant to talk to you about something,” Sylvanas told her as she made her way over to her desk and sat down opposite Velonara. “Something you’ve only proven further that you can be trusted with.”

Death did change some things, though. At one time, Velonara would have perked up at this, her attention immediate and smile hardly contained. She had always been so eager. So happy to be involved, much less help. A good person to count on. It was one of the many reasons Sylvanas had always kept her close by.

But now, a single ear lifted slowly. Velonara looked up at her. The eagerness was there. But it was like a creature waking from hibernation. Slow. Cold. Half-asleep. Life remembering how to live. A body struggling to pair with a mind that had been through so much without it before returning again to its confines.

Sylvanas knew the feeling. She went on, knowing that she had Velonara’s attention, “I’m not certain that you know the full extent of why Lady Proudmoore is staying above. Perhaps someone has told you, but perhaps they have not, since you weren’t aware of Sanguinar.”

“She opened a portal to show me she was unharmed. If I didn’t already know, I could see,” Velonara stated plainly. “Is it true then?”

She left the question, and all its implications hanging in the air. Sylvanas quirked a brow at her and folded her arms as she leaned back. “Be plain, Velonara.”

“That the child she carries is yours, through Aranal’dorei,” Velonara said, following orders as diligently as she ever had.

Sylvanas pinched the bridge of her nose at that. Of course she knew. Of course. She wasn’t surprised. Merely...well--she was not dead enough to not feel a certain way about it.

“Yes,” she answered. “So all of you know that then?”

“There’s no secrets among the dark rangers, or at least so I thought before today,” Velonara told her. 

“Wonderful,” Sylvanas sighed. “Well, that makes my explanation shorter. Yes, it’s my child. No, I do not wish to divulge any more than that, though I suspect you know enough.”

“You visit that tower every chance you get, carrying all manner of odd things with you,” Velonara pointed out. “You also have a constant watch trained on it. It’s fairly obvious to anyone involved. Even Nathanos knows.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She hadn’t imagined he would be so gracious as to not confront her about such news. Perhaps his fellow rangers had curbed his tongue. Either way, Sylvanas was grateful for whatever force had intervened to save her from having this conversation with a human male, of all things.

She always said that her rangers would be the death of her. Even death itself hadn’t changed that.

“Forget all that,” Sylvanas said, trying to dismiss such notions from her own head as much as from Velonara’s. It was easier that way. “I had something to ask of you. I remember that you were a field medic, in days past. And that before that, had some training as a midwife.”

This got her to sit straight, at least. And smile. “Are you asking me to deliver your child?”

“I’m certainly not asking an apothecary,” Sylvanas said. “Who knows what they’ll do? And they’ll be sorely disappointed to find out it’s living.”

Finally. A laugh. A solitary sound, but something of the Velonara of old--the one who dressed wounds and delivered babies as easily and eagerly as she shot a bow--and who would do whatever was asked of her without question. “I would be honored, Dark Lady.”

“Thank you.”

As relieved as she was, she tried not to show it. This eventuality was something she should have thought of earlier, but didn’t until she was away. Until she couldn’t be around Jaina, and could only think of her, rather than seeing her. Until she realized that the day when such assistance would be necessary was fast approaching.

“We will spoil her rotten, you know,” Velonara told her, still smiling.

“I suspect you would even if I told you not to,” Sylvanas acknowledged.

\---

“Kael’thas?” Sylvanas asked.

“Light no!” Jaina nearly yelled out her response. “What ever gave you that idea?”

Sylvanas turned back from the fire, where she left a loaf of dark bread to warm on the hearthstones. This had come back with her from Ogrimmar, along with a roasted boar shank that was warming up on the spit. Or at least, so she had explained.

It was...nice to have her back. For some reason, this last trip of hers had felt longer than the three days it actually encompassed. 

The fact that she hadn’t made much of a fuss about the whole incident with Valeera helped too. Jaina had blurted it right out as soon as she’d reached the top of the stairs that night, but Sylvanas waved her off and said she already knew. Of course she did. 

She also shared Jaina’s sentiment about what would result from Valeera reporting what she knew. It would have happened eventually. Now was as good a time as any.

“It was a rumor. You two were close, before the war,” Sylvanas told her with a slight shrug.

The war. There had been many wars since then, but that would always be Sylvanas' war.

Jaina shook her head vehemently at this. “Not on my life. He very much wished for such a thing, I’m sure. But it was my understanding that he did with any pretty young thing that crossed his path.”

Sylvanas chuckled at this. “You’re not incorrect there.”

“See? All the more reason for me to have rejected him. And I did. Probably a little less politely than I should have,” Jaina informed her.

How they had gotten on the subject of potential old flames was beyond her. Their conversations always had a strange way of flowing from present, to future, to past, and back again. 

“What about you? Did your prince ever try to capture the legendary beauty of the Ranger General?” Jaina asked.

Sylvanas was still standing by the hearth. She stared down at Jaina for a moment before shaking her head with a small smile. “He knew better than to try,” Sylvanas answered.

“So elusive.”

“He was not my type,” Sylvanas elaborated. 

“What about you and Blightcaller?” Jaina wondered, though she knew that to be as foolish a rumor as her having had any sort of relationship with Kael’thas was.

She’d never seen Sylvanas visibly recoil before. It was a very fun reaction, to say the least.

“Nathanos? Belore! He is a dear friend, and an incredible pain in my ass. He suffers from the same problem as the prince, on top of being otherwise horrific to look at. Even after I had him restored.”

“Full of himself?” Jaina questioned with a laugh.

“Sure,” Sylvanas answered, finally taking her seat next to Jaina.

A realization dawned on Jaina then. One that she instantly felt foolish for not having had earlier. It made so much sense. Why Sylvanas had known so much about the ritual. Why she didn’t have a long list of old lovers to talk about. Why all her rangers seemed to be women, well, besides the last one they’d mentioned.

“You...prefer women, don’t you?” Jaina asked. She already knew the answer, but she still wanted to hear the confirmation from Sylvanas’ own lips.

“Yes,” she answered simply. “And you seem to prefer men?”

“No,” Jaina followed up with her own, perhaps less-expected answer. “I don’t have a preference. My culture generally does, on account of needing to regularly reproduce to keep up our population, or at least I would like to imagine. But as for me, I find men and women equally attractive.”

“Oh.”

It was one word. So quiet and subdued. No snark or swagger behind it. A very not Sylvanas response. 

Sylvanas seemed to realize this and added on to cover the silence, “It’s just that your relationship partners seemed to be strictly of the male variety.”

“Those that were publicly know of, sure,” Jaina offered with a shrug. And yes, she’d been with women in the past. Mostly flings. Nothing serious. Nothing worth having to explain to her mother over, at least, back when they still wrote.

Katherine had begged her for grandchildren since Jaina was barely seventeen and still betrothed to Arthas. Jaina was thankful for her homeland’s isolation, now more so than ever. It meant that, even if the entire Alliance knew, it would still be some time before her poor mother found out that her first grandchild was going to be half elven, with two mothers and no father, and that one of them was the current Warchief of the Horde.

Yes, best to let that news take its sweet time to reach the shores of Kul Tiras, lest they want to deal with a fleet of green-sailed ships showing up on the shores of Lordaeron.

Another, “Oh,” that was then followed by, “but what about the dragon?”

“Yes,” Jaina answered. “And if you would believe it, the worst lover of all of them.”

“Really?”

“He’s such a gentle soul. I found out that such a thing doesn’t always make for excitement in the bedroom,” Jaina told her. 

“What a thrilling life you lead,” Sylvanas chuckled. “Mastering the arcane. Sleeping with dragons. Carrying the Banshee Queen’s child.”

“I am a woman of many talents. What can I say?”

Jaina Proudmoore was just that, she supposed. She was also a woman of many failures, failures that once wrote themselves on her heart as plainly as they did on her body--in her mana-whitened hair and the crow’s feet and browlines that were catching up to her from all the squinting and frowning she’d done in her life. The Scourge, Theramore, Dalaran, all these things that haunted her thoughts to the point where she once drove herself into frenzies just to escape them. Now, they didn’t seem to chase her as relentlessly. 

Sure, they still caught up to her some days. But instead of consuming her, they merely ran alongside her, darkening her path with their shadows. But she could still keep up. She could still run. 

And it helped that Sylvanas would stay with her, even if she didn’t speak to her. She had been content to keep silent beside her. To just pick up one of Jaina’s books to entertain herself with, and would only leave if asked. But Jaina rarely asked for that.

And that, among many reasons, was perhaps why she felt as if she had an edge in this race now. As Valeera had told her, there were people still left that cared about her. Even with all these failures and demons that dogged her. People that she hadn’t had to create simply for the purpose. 

People that very well might have been in the same room with her that night. Maybe.

The conversation trended toward the future again. Sylvanas cut her slices of warmed meat and bread and brought it to her on one of the little china plates Jaina had snatched on a clandestined trip back to her old quarters in Stormwind.

“It will be interesting to see what your King Wrynn will have to say to all this,” Sylvanas said.

Jaina was busy conjuring herself some butter for the bread. It took her a moment to answer. “I honestly have no idea what he’ll think. It hardly matters. I love Anduin dearly. I watched him grow up, but he is my king only when I choose. Though I haven’t exactly followed this rule in the past, I think that I will be better served by adopting the old Kirin Tor policy of neutrality for the rest of my days.”

Sylvanas stalked back to her chair, but did not sit. “Another bold statement from you.”

“I’ve been thinking about it, while you were gone,” Jaina told her. “I don’t know what other option I have.”

“As much as I wish I could invite you to declare loyalty to the Horde, I think Lor’themar would personally call for my head if I did such a thing,” Sylvanas informed her, and paced back toward the spit, fiddling with the remainder of the shank on it.

She was a fiddler. Jaina knew that much now. Sylvanas liked to keep her hands busy. It was a common trait among elves. Something to do with burning off excess magical energies that followed through them. Funny, though, to see her still doing it in her undeath, when there was no such need.

“And he would have every right to do so,” Jaina agreed. 

She took a bite of the bread, which was much improved by the butter. She’d had orcish bread before, and this was no different. So dense and tough, as if they thought the whole grains in it would toughen them due to how hard it was to eat. Well, it was probably very good for you. And that was probably why it was on Jaina’s plate in the first place.

She ate it without complaint.

“I don’t think you’d be inclined to either,” Sylvanas said, still messing about by the fire.

She wasn’t. Jaina had come to terms with the fact that what remained of the Horde was not responsible for any of the atrocities it had committed against her and hers. Still, the name alone was enough to turn her stomach. No, she could not have made that pledge, even if it was desired of her.

“No,” Jaina answered. “Like I said, neutrality is my best option.”

It was her only option. If she was to stand by the decisions she made, and their results, that is.

“Was that all you were thinking of while I was gone?” Sylvanas asked after a moment.

It wasn’t. Not by a long shot. But that was a topic for another time.

So Jaina answered with another question. One that had indeed come into her mind on one of the nights she spent alone. “What are your thoughts on names?”

“For the child?”

“Who else?”

Sylvanas turned away from the fire then, and stood again before giving her answer. “You would choose a name before?” she asked, utterly bewildered--ears pricked up just the slightest bit and brows raised so far that gravity dared droop them down at the ends. 

It was almost enough to make Jaina laugh. “Some people do,” she answered.

“Not mine,” Sylvanas informed her in a way that almost sounded offended by the idea. “That’s like claiming to know someone’s character before you meet them. Never before.”

“Not even making a list to pick from?” Jaina wondered. She knew her parents had done so with herself and her siblings. She had almost been a Cynthia. Ghastly.

“No,” Sylvanas answered firmly.

“Then I will happily defer that conversation for after she’s born,” Jaina said, waving the thought away with another slice of bread. 

“The family name, though,” Sylvanas said, sitting down with the thought.

When she didn’t finish it, Jaina bit, “What is the elven tradition of that?”

“If the parents are unmarried, which isn’t considered all that improper among us, then the child takes the higher ranking parent’s name.”

“Guess she’s a Windrunner then,” Jaina said with a laugh.

“No argument there? I expected more from you, honestly,” Sylvanas replied.

“You are the ruler of an entire faction. Before that, a people you saved, and before even that, the head of the military of Quel’thalas. Me? I’m no one now,” Jaina explained. 

“I believe you would find that untrue, if you were to ask the right people,” Sylvanas told her. “And before that, Archmage of the Kirin Tor, the Lady of Theramore, and, as I understand it, an heir to the Admiralty of Kul Tiras.”

“Two things that I cannot be again and one that will never happen,” Jaina corrected her. 

“My point remains. You’re not without rank or titles of your own, Jaina.”

The way she said her name was so strange anymore. Still so unexpected every time it graced her ears. When Sylvanas spoke softly, the double tone of her voice was diminished. Not completely gone, but enough that Jaina could hear more of her real voice than the banshee one. It was very pleasant. Smooth and light with her lilting elven accent. Sylvanas spoke Common to her, one of at least four languages she had to have been fluent in. And she always spoke it well. Much better than Jaina could have in Thalassian, if the tables were turned.

“Her cousins are Windrunners,” Jaina countered. It was mildly true. Giramar and Galadin were, at least. Arator, well, he didn’t really use any name but his given one, but would have been a Windrunner by the before-mentioned tradition.

“We shall see what fits when the time comes,” Sylvanas said. 

They went to the present again, discussing Sylvanas’ visit to the orc city, while Jaina ate the rest of her meal. Of how she’d left Nathanos there, along with a contingent of other dark rangers, to contain some aggression on Varok Saurfang’s part. Something about night elves encroaching too far in Ashenvale. Nothing serious, not yet, but tensions always seemed to run highest on those borders. Enough that it was cause to divert Sylvanas’ attention for a few days.

Jaina like that she talked about these things with her. That she saw no point in hiding them. That she knew that Jaina was interested and invested. For many reasons. 

Reasons that caused her to be grateful for the hand that was wordlessly offered to help her out of her chair when she struggled to rise by herself.

“Thank you,” Jaina said as she finally got to her feet. “I’m getting a little...round these days. Might have to change up the furniture to make that easier on myself.”

“Just as I was beginning to like that chair,” Sylvanas sighed in mock reproach.

It had taken her a moment to release Jaina’s hand. A moment longer than it needed to be.

“Well, I don’t have to change yours,” Jaina offered, trying to pretend as if she hadn’t noticed that.

Sylvanas had come again without her armor, as she had ever since that first night Jaina had asked her to stay with her. Today, she was in all black. A soft linen shirt with silver threading and leather pants. No hood covering her hair. No gloves. The skin of her hand had been rough in some places, smooth in others, and it took very little effort for her to haul Jaina up out of the chair.

“So it’s mine now, is it?” Sylvanas asked.

Damn. She’d been caught. “No one else uses it, so I suppose it is,” Jaina excused.

Sylvanas chuckled at that. “I suppose.”

Nevermind that Valeera had. It was Sylvanas’ chair. Jaina was glad to see her back in it tonight. Glad to talk to her, softly enough to hear her real voice. Glad to see her laugh and joke. To hear the sarcasm and wit she dripped with in her casual conversation. Just...glad to have her.

“I’m glad you didn’t have to be too long in Orgrimmar,” Jaina said. It was as close as she could allow herself to get to saying what she meant.

“So am I,” Sylvanas said. Only she didn’t laugh. She didn’t make some joke about foul-smelling orcs. She only looked at Jaina.

Red eyes that she once found hard to look at now captured her. Their undead glow hid any meaning from Jaina. But the gesture itself was not lost on her.

“Can you stay with me tonight?” she asked. “Or do you have work to do?”

Sylvanas never had work to do that would keep her away. At least, not while she was on the same continent. “I can stay,” Sylvanas told her before she looked away. “I’ll let you change.”

Jaina took her time doing just that. She wasn’t sure why. They’d done this many times before. Sylvanas hadn’t troubled her about it since the first time. She’d never even said no when asked. She rarely said no to anything Jaina asked of her. 

Jaina just felt she needed time to think. She slid her nightgown over the swell of her belly, and stood next to the bed for a good few moments, just trying to organize those thoughts. But they wouldn’t calm down. They flitted all over the place, like flies over honey. Papers in the wind--each sheet bearing some important message, but moving too fast to be read.

The vigorous nightly exercise going on in her abdomen didn't help either.

“You can come back up,” Jaina finally called back down the stairs after she gave up.

It was strange that this had become so routine. So normal. So much so that they didn’t have to speak further. Sylvanas ascended the stairs, then just made her way to the bed. She sat on the same side of it she always did, as Jaina slipped beneath the covers on the other side.

“Have you been sleeping better? Be honest,” Sylvanas asked as Jaina calmed the fire from afar, dimming the light in the room.

So much so that Jaina could barely see her when she turned to face her. A move that took far more effort than it used to. “Yes and no,” she answered, honestly. “Yes in that I don’t lie awake thinking in circles as much. No in that my back hurts now. And that someone who you tell me we’re not allowed to give a name to yet still likes to be active at night. Are you sure you were a high elf and not a night elf?”

“Pretty sure,” Sylvanas answered. Jaina could hear the smile in her voice.

How many other people in this world knew what that sounded like? Very few, she imagined. Maybe a handful of her rangers. But still, that brought a question to Jaina’s mind. One that she had never thought to ask. “Sylvanas?”

“Yes?”

“You’re not...romantically involved with anyone? Right? I hadn’t thought about that before. If you were, I can’t imagine that this would go over well,” Jaina said, stopping herself short on that last syllable as she realized she was starting to ramble.

“No,” came the answer. Short and sweet. But only for a moment. She continued on, “I have not been with anyone for a very long time. There was always something more important, more pressing, and then I was dead.”

“Right, just like having kids,” Jaina said.

“Very much the same,” Sylvanas replied. 

The glow of her eyes was all that illuminated her to Jaina’s weaker vision now. “I suppose that’s fortunate then. I would hate to have driven a wedge between you and anyone important to you,” Jaina said, making excuses for herself, mostly.

“Nothing like that. Just a few thousand undead that revere me like a goddess and make me worry about how they will see my daughter,” Sylvanas said, back to her dark humor again.

Well, not exactly humor. That was indeed somewhat of a worry. Jaina could almost picture the odd, cult-like following that Sylvanas had suddenly bowing to her child. A tiny, half elf baby. A very strange image indeed.

“Sylvanas?” Jaina asked again to the dark.

“Yes?” the answer came again.

“Can I ask something of you? Something that I want you to honestly tell me no to, if you do not wish to do it,” Jaina wondered.

“Go on,” Sylvanas directed. Neither suspicious or agitated. Curious, maybe.

Jaina swallowed. This was stupid. This was impulsive. 

But stupid and impulsive had gotten her here in the first place. Both of them. It had gotten her a peace she didn’t think she could attain again. And it wasn’t because of the result of the ritual they had performed. 

It was because Jaina had someone to talk to. Someone who listened. Someone who might actually care. Not about her titles. Not about her magic. Not even entirely about the child she would bear. About just her. How she was feeling. What she ate. If she slept well. If her thoughts were calmer.

And it was someone she had never imagined would care about such things. Someone she had only learned had the capacity for such consideration when it was given to her. And kept being given.

“Can you put your arms around me?” Jaina asked.

Sylvanas didn’t ask another question. Not at first. That red gaze drifted down to her. Then to the space between them. Sylvanas didn’t lift the covers, but she stretched her lean body over the top of them, laying down parallel to Jaina. She slid a hand, slowly, across her, over her round belly, and to her back.

“Like this?”

“You were supposed to say no,” Jaina nearly whispered.

“I told you before, I will continue to surprise you.”

The coolness of her hand was nice on Jaina’s back. She was so stiff and unmoving next to her. That was odd. Hard to get used to. But the rest of it? Well, it was very easy to get used to. So easy that even the baby seemed to be calmed by it, and so easy that it let Jaina fall asleep before she could dwell on it further.

\---

“I never knew you had a thing for flowers,” Sylvanas remarked as she ascended the stairs yet again the next day. 

The room was changed. Always, some little thing about it had been different from day to day. Jaina seemed incapable of leaving things well enough alone. But today, it was awash in color. Here, a vase of Blindweed. There, a long, low planter full of white and yellow Peacebloom. Every flower that could be found in the Eastern Kingdoms, and maybe a few beyond grew in various states and various containers--some thriving and some decidedly not.

“I don’t,” Jaina answered, still worrying over some Mageroyal, bent as best she could bend over the bucket it was in. Only one of the flowers was properly red and open. The others were withered, pitiful things--brown and crisp as though singed by fire.

“Then all this is…?” Sylvanas dared to ask.

“Today’s fixation,” Jaina offered. She touched the last red blossom, and this too shriveled into a papery shell of its former glory. “I am terrible with nature magic, as you can see. Kind of a wonder that I’ve managed to create and sustain any sort of living thing, really.”

“That’s hardly comforting,” Sylvanas said as she brushed a sprig of Kingsblood that was only slightly wilting in its jam jar home. Perhaps it was her dulled nerves, but it felt wrong...almost. The petals were too soft, the leaves too stiff. “Are you trying to improve your skills?”

“I don’t know if I can,” Jaina replied. She gestured to the Mageroyal bush, now a pitiful array of blackened sticks with her efforts, and it dissolved into nothing, taking the bucket it had been conjured in with it. “Sometimes, we all need a little grounding.”

“Is that so?” Sylvanas asked. She slid past a bouquet of Wild Steelbloom and Purple Lotus before those too faded away.

Gradually, all the flowers began to slip back into the formless arcane energy that had borne them. The color faded from the room as Sylvanas set her parcel down by the hearth. Tonight’s offering was simple, sharp white cheese, a few golden apples, and crackers. A combination of things that she knew to be a favorite now, which had become her goto when creativity, or supply, failed her otherwise.

The only flowers that remained were a small arrangement above the hearth. Peacebloom again, and Silverleaf, bundled into a clumsy chain. The blooms themselves were irregular, missing petals here and there, with dark spots in their centers. And the leaves of the herb were much the same, some broken in places, others curled at their edges. Sylvanas reached out to touch these as well, drawn to answer a question she hadn’t voiced. 

“These are real,” she answered as she brushed the spiny edges of a leaf with her thumb

“They were the start,” Jaina explained as she came over. “I felt like going outside today. Turns out the snow we had didn’t kill everything. It was nice to see something growing in the ruins.”

“I wasn’t aware that anything could grow here,” Sylvanas said. “Out in the woods near Brill, yes. But in the ruins?”

“Yes, in the ruins,” Jaina remarked. She paid no further attention to it and went about dispatching an apple.

She liked them peeled. Who peeled apples, if they weren’t to be used for baking? Humans, apparently. Jaina, apparently, as she sat back in a new chair, that didn’t sink back as far, and tossed a piece of apple skin into the hearth fire. 

Sylvanas’ chair was unchanged.

“And no, I didn’t try the stairs, so don’t fret. I used a portal. I’m not going to try walking down those until I am exactly one baby lighter, thank you,” Jaina continued to explain.

“About that,” Sylvanas started as she turned away from the mantle. 

Jaina looked up in question, even as she sliced a piece of the peeled half of her apple off and popped it into her mouth. 

“You’ve never given me an answer, about what you plan to do...after,” Sylvanas said.

It was true enough. Jaina deferred any notion of talking about her plans for the future. But the time was drawing nearer when she would have to consider that future as the present. When this limbo they were in would end. And now that the whole world was bound to find out, well, they would have to deal with whatever consequences came along.

“Because I still find myself lacking in a plan,” Jaina told her. Her eyes were searching, dark in their blue today.

“Will you stay here then? I can’t imagine that would work well for your commitment to neutrality," Sylvanas noted.

Outside, dusk was fading fast, as it tended to do in the winter. The tower room darkened by the minute, as even its high vantage over the edge of the crumbling walls of the old city wasn't enough to keep the sun from slipping past the horizon. 

Jaina stopped cutting away at her apple. "I don't know."

"Would Khadgar be persuaded to allow you back into Dalaran?" Sylvanas pressed. 

She wasn't sure she liked the idea, but that was better than some others she'd had. Dalaran's tendency to move close to threats wasn't exactly appealing. Perhaps it could be suggested that it return to its original location, right across the lake from here. And from her.

"I doubt he'd need persuading. He's been trying to get me to come back ever since I left," Jaina informed her. "But that doesn't mean I wish to go back there. Not after how I left."

"Then where?" Sylvanas asked.

"Can we talk about something else?" Jaina asked back.

She'd let this go many times before. Jaina had never deferred the conversation so directly, though. But today, Sylvanas was not sure she was ready to let it go. Not again. Not yet.

"Will you tell me, then, when you figure it out?" Another question was a dangerous thing to pose. A test, perhaps, of the relative calm that Jaina had seemed to settle into.

A test that she did not pass. “What are you going to do if I don’t? Are you going to give me a deadline? Throw me out onto the curb like I’m late on rent?”

“Jaina--”

This was a mistake. One she thought they were past already, but perhaps not. Sylvanas wasn’t sure if she had missed some sign, some indication. Maybe it was the flowers. Maybe the way Jaina looked at her. But usually, if things were this way, she wouldn’t look at her.

And now she was staring up at her. 

“No. Don’t do that. Don’t you do that to me again,” Jaina said as she stood, apple rolling to the floor and against the edge of the hearth, forgotten. “Listen for a moment. Don’t talk. Just listen.”

Sylvanas silenced whatever protests were coming to her lips, whatever apologies. She only watched as Jaina approached her, and stood firm, hoping that she could calm her down again.

“I have no idea what I’m going to do,” Jaina told her. Tears stung at her eyes, threatening to roll over onto her cheeks, but even these somehow knew she was not to be interrupted. “It’s not because I want to hide from you. It’s not because I want to take our child away and keep her from you. All right?”

Jaina gestured first to her, then hesitated. Then she pointed vaguely at the room itself. “This? Here? I haven’t been as happy as I am here, right now, for a long time. A very long time, Sylvanas. And I don’t entirely know why. At first, I thought I was truly going crazy, not being able to leave for fear of revealing myself. And now that it really doesn’t matter, I could go. I could go wherever I wanted to. But I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

That was not something Sylvanas had considered. To any other living being, the Undercity and the immediate area above and around always seemed repugnant. Even Horde soldiers passed through with little more than scoffs and sniffs at the undead in their lair. Not to mention the cursed aspect that the place had. And well, the company was hardly worth writing home about. At least, so she was told.

Jaina closed what little distance there was left between them. So close that Sylvanas could feel the heat of her breath as she went on. “I have tried to understand why. Tried to understand why not. But I come back to the same thing. I have nothing else left in this world. Nothing waiting for me. Nothing binding me. Nothing I have to do or have to be, except for what is to come. I thought that being a mother would solve all of my problems and give me the purpose I was so sorely lacking. I thought that I would just be spending my time here, waiting for that.”

“I’ve said before--”

Jaina grabbed at the front of Sylvanas’ shirt. Today, it was a leather jerkin, dyed the color of good wine. “I’m not done. Dammit! I’m trying to explain. You make it so hard.”

Sylvanas could only think to try to calm her, to try to stop whatever self-destruction she might rain down upon herself. It was difficult to see her like this. Angry. Frustrated. Broken.

All feelings that Sylvanas knew well. She caught Jaina’s wrist as it tensed in her grip. But she didn’t speak again, didn’t pull it away, as she could have easily enough. Instead, she stroked gently down her arm, then back up again. She waited for Jaina to collect her thoughts.

Jaina held on all the same when she did. “What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to leave. I found my peace and purpose already. I found it in every calm word and cool rationality you’ve given me. Every stupid little smirk you think I don’t see, and every terrible joke you drop when you think I need to laugh. I know I have to go. I know I can’t stay here forever. But, as crazy as this sounds, on top of everything else, I don’t think I want to leave you.”

Every instinct Sylvanas had told her to reach out and pull Jaina into her arms. But she didn’t. She ignored these, as she had time and time again. No one wanted that. No. Something was wrong here. No one could find comfort in her, a cold, dead thing. An entity whose only remaining purpose was war and the waging of it. Strategy and tactics--a fitting eternity for a General who only ever wanted the peaceful, glorious end that was promised to her.

“Sylvanas,” Jaina breathed as she gripped at the other shoulder of her jerkin. “Now you can speak. Please. Say something.”

Words and wit had been her weapons. Ever since her first death and even before it. A snapping comeback to anything was easier for her to show than a genuine reaction. Genuine things hurt. Reality was cruel and cutting. 

But, as she had made a habit of doing these last few months, Jaina had once again rendered her wordless. 

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Jaina said to her slience. Then she leaned in and kissed her.

Jaina’s lips were as soft as they looked, though she pressed them hard against Sylvanas’. But then instinct took over without question. Sylvanas closed her eyes. She let her arms fall around Jaina--a hand snaking under her braid to rest against her back. Another going to rest past the curve of her stomach, where it held them awkwardly too far apart for any of this, and then onto her hip. And she glowed, like fire and mana, and tasted of both. Of danger and disaster and things that were decidedly not wise or strategic. Things that Sylvanas had thought were lost to her.

Impossible things that Jaina continued to make possible for her.

Things that Sylvanas found herself chasing after, when Jaina pulled away.

“There. Tell me I’m being impulsive and foolish again. Please,” Jaina nearly whispered.

Sylvanas didn’t understand any of this. She instead questioned it. A thousand thoughts raced through her mind, doubting that Jaina could actually, truly, want her. This had to be some strange reaction, another one of her fixations and fits. Perhaps she was just lonely. Just desperate again.

But there was one way to find that out sooner rather than later. Sylvanas kissed her this time.

And Jaina didn’t pull away. She didn’t cling to her for dear life either. One fist remained balled in her jerkin, but the other hand made its way between them, drifting down as if to confirm that, yes, there was no way to get closer. Not with what had brought them together in the first place so rudely standing in the way.

“Mmh, hang on, some of us still need to breathe,” Jaina said when she did pull away again. “And some of us are also questioning their sanity here. You...feel the same?”

Sylvanas let the hand she’d kept on Jaina’s back stroke along it, following the curve of her spine down to where she knew it pained her. She settled it there, and only then did she speak. 

“I didn’t think you would allow it,” Sylvanas told her. “But I very much enjoy your company. And you might think that this is more of my scheming and plotting, but it’s not. I would miss you, Jaina, if you were to go. I don’t want you to leave, not now, not after. But I worry. For you. Not just about the baby. I care about you.”

“And you, the fearsome Banshee Queen, do it better than anyone else has,” Jaina told her. She leaned her head against Sylvanas’ shoulder. A tear or two had fallen in the mix of all of these emotions, and now mingled with the dark leather of her jerkin. “When did that start?”

“I’m not sure,” Sylvanas confessed. 

She wasn’t, really. At first, once the initial shock had worn off, her feelings toward Jaina had mostly been that of annoyance and a more self-preserving worry. A time bomb was in her backyard, waiting to go off, yet now tied to something so incredibly precious that it was worth taking the risk of facing the explosion. But somewhere, that worry had turned to concern, for this woman who had suffered so much, and who had so little solace. Then interest, in the person that was Jaina Proudmoore, not the Archmage, not the enemy. No, for the woman who peeled her apples and loved how old books smelled and avoided truths that were too difficult to deal with and liked to be held at night.

Then somewhere, a fondness Sylvanas didn’t realize she had the capacity for any longer. Yet there it was.

“Me either,” Jaina told her. “But I’ve gone and made this even messier, haven’t I?”

“Not really,” Sylvanas told her. 

Really, though, it was. Somehow, this was going to be more difficult to explain than the original circumstances of their...well, circumstance.

Not that Sylvanas minded. And perhaps then, it would be easier.

“Sylvanas?”

“Yes?”

“Can I kiss you again?”

Sylvanas thought she knew before when to be quiet, when words wouldn’t suffice to ease Jaina’s mood, or to take her mind off of whatever it had decided to dwell on that day. But it wasn’t until then that she learned her silence was better served in a different way. That actions spoke louder than words. So she kissed instead of saying yes.

And Sylvanas realized that, perhaps, in this connection that they had, borne of ill-thought actions, there was something to be learned by feeling again, without thinking. Something new to be made from the ruins of old, like flowers growing out from the cracks of broken castles.

\---

It snowed again a few weeks later. This time, it was to be expected. The depths of winter had come to Lordaeron, and with that, snow weighing down both the pines that still stood, and the rotting logs of those that had fallen to what was left of the disease that still ate at the land. 

Jaina had begun to notice the patterns of her dark ranger guard. She saw them in delicate footprints in the snow, atop walls and across caved-in roofs. Rarely ever on the ground, but sometimes, yes. They never moved when she was watching, and she was almost certain that they could see her, or otherwise sense her attentions. Even a bit of odd scrying here and there didn’t reveal much. 

But she surmised that this was part of their game. The secrecy of it all. The subterfuge. Sylvanas had tried to explain it. 

“Elves never stop playing,” had been her best attempt.

Jaina was still trying to get her to play. In the times that Sylvanas would drop her masks, let down her guard, and just be with her, she would. Her jokes got even worse, and her sense of humor was as dark as the clothes she wore.

Jaina loved it.

So that’s why she’d taken to looking out of the tower windows during the day. To search for signs of the mysterious creatures that watched her. To map out the marks they left in the new snow, and to play her small, and perhaps unknown part in their game.

She was just about out of books to read, after all. 

But today, she saw something different out there. Movement. The winter sun shining on silver and blue and white. A lone figure emerged from the rubble of the courtyard below Jaina’s tower. One that she would not mistake anywhere.

Vereesa Windrunner was coming to knock on her door. Alone.

And Vereesa was familiar enough with her wards to knock properly at them, at least. As Jaina walked away from the window, she felt her brush up against them, leaving just enough of a trace of her own innate magic to identify herself and nothing more. 

Jaina let down the wards, but didn’t portal down or open one up for Vereesa. No. She needed the time that it would take her to get up all the stairs. For what, she wasn’t sure. To wonder at how she had gotten past the watch? No, she didn’t sneak in. She was allowed in. To prepare what she would say to her? What could she even? She had no idea why Vereesa was there. Only that she could hear her steps on the tower stairs. Soft, like her sister’s were. 

“Jaina,” she called from just below the floor. “I just want to talk. I may or may not have convinced my sister to let me see you. I definitely cried in front of her again, so please, at least let me talk to you for that, if nothing else.”

Seeing her was another matter, as Jaina quickly realized. She fussed at her messy braid and loose robes. Nothing to do about any of that now. It was what it was.

The footsteps stopped. “Come up,” Jaina bade her.

Vereesa didn’t say anything at first. She just stood still, hands on the banister. She blinked once, twice, and bit at her lip, hard enough that Jaina had to wonder if that was advisable, considering that she was doing it with a pair of elven fangs.

“Belore, look at you,” she finally said. “When Anduin told me I didn’t believe it at first. I thought Valeera was playing some cruel joke on him. But it’s all true.”

“Are you angry with me?” Jaina asked. 

The last time they spoke, she had been. She’d been so angry. Vereesa, who had been her last supporter, who stuck with her from Theramore and past it’s end. Vereesa, who didn’t question her in Dalaran, and supported her rule, however problematic it was. Vereesa, who had cried on Jaina’s shoulder as much as Jaina had cried on hers. 

She’d pushed her away. Physically. She’d told her she couldn’t do this anymore. That she couldn’t give her what she wanted, and that there was no helping her, not anymore.

After a time, Jaina had started to believe her.

“No,” Vereesa answered. “I’m just glad you’re alive. And safe. As for the rest of it, I still don’t understand, and even less so now that my sister is involved. And you’re in love with her?”

“Love is a strong word for right now,” Jaina cautioned. “But she’s proven to be very...pleasant company. And she’s very eager to meet our daughter and care for her.”

“Gods, I never saw Sylvanas as being anyone’s mother, even when we were children together. She always hid my dolls from me and told me they were stupid,” Vereesa said. Her shoulder relaxed a little, letting the folds of her silver and blue tabard fall with them. She wore her full ceremonial armor, as if dressed for a state visit.

“You’re here with someone, aren’t you?” Jaina questioned as she realized this.

“Anduin is talking with Sylvanas down below,” Vereesa reported.

“Fuck,” Jaina puffed out in a half-laugh. “I’m sure she’s thrilled about that.”

“Incredibly so. But she’s entertaining him. Jaina?”

“Yes?”

Vereesa took a step toward her, but then stopped, as if reconsidering it. “I promise, I’m not angry with you. I’m not going to pretend to understand or rationalize the decisions you’ve made. I'm not going to tell you I agree with them fully. I still don’t. But I’ve missed you so much. I missed my friend. I mourned for you in a way I never thought I would. Can I have a hug, please?”

“Yes,” Jaina said.

She met the youngest Windrunner sister half way. Vereesa was small in her arms. Small and warm and soft--strange when compared to her older sister. She cried into the front of Jaina’s robes, mumbling something or other about being sorry. 

But it didn’t really matter. None of it mattered. The bile that had clung to Jaina’s throat at the mere thought of her had already vanished. Instead, it was replaced by the heaviness of a heart they both shared. Of nights of tears shed and unshed. Of hopes and dreams they shared, only to see dashed. Of the realization that yes, she had missed this. She had missed her friend.

“You’re as big as a fucking house,” Vereesa sniffled as she pushed herself out of Jaina’s embrace by her shoulders, and looked her over.

“Eight months,” Jaina told her. “I am literally counting down the days until this thing is out of me. I see now why you told me I was crazy to wish this upon myself.”

“Imagine two of them at once. It was hell. Can we sit down? I know you’re probably dying to,” Vereesa asked.

“You have no idea,” Jaina laughed, then pointed toward the dining set she so rarely used.

“I do, but we can commiserate about that later. It’s good to see you smiling again, you know,” Vereesa said as she went over and pulled out two chairs, one for both of them.

“It’s good to be smiling again,” Jaina told her.

As for why she was, well, that was perhaps an even more awkward conversation to have. Perhaps one she’d save for another day. Vereesa didn't need to know exactly how much of that was due to her sister, and not necessarily the circumstances she'd made possible for Jaina otherwise. But there would be a chance for another day. Well, more than a chance. In fact, as Jaina sat and grabbed for Vereesa's hand to hold in hers, she knew it for certain.

\---

“So…”

“So,” Sylvanas replied. She wasn’t used to entertaining talks about her personal life with teenage kings. It made for a dreadful way to pass the hour.

And now that Little Moon had left to go do her crying in front of Jaina instead, there were no distractions left, save an odd mix of Anduin’s Alliance honor guard and her own deathguards and dark rangers that held to the sides of what functioned as her throne room. Absent a throne. Just a dais, where she and the boy king stood.

Anduin had never been to the Undercity before this, and it showed. He looked about more often than he needed to, scanning the skeletal faces of the undead that remained in the room, clearly uncomfortable. Clearly a young man who, while he’d had his own brushes with death, was still not settled enough on the idea of his own mortality to embrace it, much less fathom what might come after.

As much as Sylvanas would normally delight in seeing him squirm, she found herself pitying him, just a tiny bit. But it was bold move, coming alone, with just Vereesa tagging along to make her own request. She had to admire that.

Now if only he would get to the point.

“You’re certain you don’t think it’s a good idea for me to accompany Vereesa?” Anduin asked after a moment more of him rocking back onto his heels.

“I am certain that whatever happened between her and Jaina that she feels she must mend is something that should stay between them,” Sylvanas answered. “But I will pass on your regards to Lady Proudmoore, and a note, if you wish.”

“Oh that’s...quite all right. I just--this whole thing is kind of a shock to the system, that’s all,” Anduin proclaimed, throwing his hands up to wave in front of his face.

Sylvanas understood the gesture. Humans always did such silly things with their hands when talking. “Yet your overtures seem to remain positive.”

“They are. I assure you they are,” he replied, waving around again. “That’s why I wanted to think on it a bit before I spoke with you. I’m not certain when or how you and Jaina conceived of this plan, but it’s going to be a wonderful way to keep the peace between us a lasting one.”

“That’s not--” Sylvanas stopped herself. He really thought that this was planned. Another scheme? Another wizened move? A chess piece, moved in line for a capture?

Who was she to tell him it was anything but that?

“That is to say, it wasn’t our direct intentions, but I suppose that yes, this child will be a symbol of sorts,” Sylvanas went on.

“More than that,” Anduin said with a vigorous nod. “Between you and Jaina, it will have claims on more titles than I can probably remember.”

“She,” Sylvanas corrected.

“She?”

Sylvanas didn’t answer. No, she was not about to explain that to the boy king for Stormwind.

“Right, sorry. She will,” he babbled on. “But it’s really about more than that, isn’t it? The two of you put aside whatever differences you might have had to create something. That means all of us can do it.”

“I suppose so,” Sylvanas replied. 

She should have prepared for this. She should have known she would have to listen to this sugar-glazes nonsense. By the sun, she’d thought Jaina was bad enough. The boy was ten times worse.

“And I’ll finally get someone to call me Uncle,” Anduin went on with a beaming smile.

That Sylvanas answered with a steady glare.

“Or...maybe not?”

\---

Letters had come pouring in after that. Across faction barriers and continents. Now that everyone knew where she was, and what she was doing there, the letters found her. More often than not, straight from Sylvanas’ hand. But sometimes, from Velonara, who had started coming up regularly to check on her. 

Jaina hadn’t been thrilled with the idea of a dark ranger she didn’t know assisting with her impending delivery, but the elf’s gentle nature and eagerness to please had won her over quickly. 

Today, Velonara had brought with her letters from Baine Bloodhoof, Khadgar, and Tess Greymane, of all people. A strange combination indeed. Khadgar had even thrown in a gold piece in his letter, stating that it was for Jaina’s daughter to wish on in the fountain during her first visit to Dalaran, whenever that might be.

And that was the tone of the rest of them. Supportive. Inquisitive. Kind. Maybe a little confused, but not so much that it threw them off. But much the same as Vereesa had been, all of her former friends and acquaintances were happy to know that she was alive and well. And happier still for her that she was about to get something she had wanted so badly for so long that the whole world knew of it.

As nice as it was to have their sentiments and well wishes, it wasn’t until the evening that Jaina could return them in full. Even now, she kept coy about it as she heard Sylvanas ascend the stairs, and Jaina waited until she placed a cool, soft kiss at the base of her neck before she turned away from re-reading Khadgar’s letter.

“What’s the point of the gold?” Sylvanas asked as she slid her arms around Jaina’s shoulders and leaned into her from where she sat at her desk.

And Jaina leaned back into her. She’d gotten used to the chill of her skin. It was worse now, with the weather outside, but would soon warm to the temperature of the room. By the time she was ready for bed, it would be tepid enough to be pleasant. Now that Jaina had persuaded Sylvanas to lay under the covers with her, she found she enjoyed it. She’d always run a little hot, and pregnancy hadn’t helped any of that.

“It’s for the baby to make a wish on in Dalaran. I know you’ve been there before. Didn’t you make a wish on your first visit?” Jaina asked.

Sylvanas gagged. “Uck, yes. It was awful. Something about getting married together with my sisters.”

“How old were you?” Jaina wondered with a laugh.

“Thirty-six. A baby,” Sylvanas said, hazarding another kiss to Jaina’s temple before she stood back up.

“I’m not even thirty-six yet,” Jaina reminded her. 

“A fact I am still having a hard time coming to terms with, thanks,” Sylvanas sighed as she moved over to the chairs by the hearth and began setting down whatever she’d brought with her that night.

The room had changed again. Jaina was always changing it. She couldn’t help herself. But now, instead of a madman’s study, it was beginning to resemble a nursery. There was a bassinet next to the bed now, a gift from Vereesa. Jaina had conjured herself a little chest of drawers next to it, complete with a marble top and plenty of places to store things. Baby clothes, mostly, that were being sent along with the letters. Already far, far too many baby clothes.

On top of that was a flower nest, this one fresh and new compared to those that still lined the cracks she’d left in the walls. Velonara had brought it with her the first time she came up. Apparently, it was Anya’s masterpiece, and meant not for Jaina but for the Dark Lady’s child, of course. 

And as much as she wanted to refuse these gifts, to banish the world outside from her sanctum, Jaina couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want this to end. She didn’t want to think about a life without seeing Sylvanas in the evenings, without falling asleep to cool hands brushing through her hair, but at the same time, she couldn’t forget that there were still good out there. That there was still hope for places and people and things outside of her walls. That perhaps, she was not entirely correct in her initial assessment of them abandoning her. 

And that maybe it had just taken finding the right person, however unexpected, to help her realize that. 

“What have you brought me today?” Jaina asked as she slowly and steadily got to her feet, and put Khadgar’s letter aside.

“A few things,” Sylvanas answered cryptically. She was bent over a small satchel she’d stashed on her chair, pulling a few jars from it.

“Is that so?” Jaina asked.

“Don’t worry about it. Just sit down and try to relax,” Sylvanas assured her.

“You know that’s almost impossible for me, right? Even when I’m the size of a small whale?” Jaina followed orders anyway. She went right to her chair beside Sylvanas. There wasn’t much else she could do. 

Thank the Light that Sylvanas wasn’t actually going to try to fight her as she initially feared. Jaina was pretty sure she couldn’t fight much of anything now. Even her magic was harder and hard to manipulate as the days went on. Many people didn’t realize how much finesse and physical prowess magic actually required. Jaina had neither of those right now.

But she could live with it.

“Velonara was here earlier, though I’m sure you know that,” Jaina reported as she settled into the armchair.

“Hmm, I didn’t, but I’m glad to hear it. What did she have to say?” Sylvanas asked as she continued to unpack, this time pulling out a paper-wrapped object. Triangle-shaped. Maybe cheese again?

Jaina should have never told her she liked cheese. She was nearly drowning in it. 

“Any day now,” Jaina told her. 

That much was obvious. Her belly was massive and now pointed distinctly downward. Her ankles were swollen into unrecognizable shapes. Her back ached constantly. 

There was more to tell too--details that Velonara seemed to deem important, as one who knew these things. What position the baby was in. How big she felt. How much she moved. Jaina’s main question to her was the same as it always had been, if she would be all right, healthy, normal, living.

Velonara just shook her head and said that they would know soon enough.

“I suppose that’s true,” Sylvanas said.

“I meant to ask you about that,” Jaina went on. She leaned over in her chair, not much on account of her general lack of mobility in the middle of her body, but enough that she could lay a hand on Sylvanas’ shoulder, and turn her attention to her.

“About what?” Sylvanas asked.

“How am I supposed to tell you, when it’s time?” Jaina wondered aloud. “I suppose I could send you a message in a variety of ways. I’m not sure what you’d prefer, though. Do you even want to be here?”

“Jaina.”

“If you’d rather not, then that’s fine. I can--”

“Jaina. I’m going to be here. In fact,” Sylvanas said as she returned to the satchel, then dragged out a heaping stack of papers from it, “I’m not leaving until it’s time. Unless you’d rather I leave.”

The papers were covered in everything from brutish Orcish runes to flowing Thalassian script. The plans and orders and missives of a leader. One who wasn’t sure about the next few weeks of her schedule. One who planned to be working from these alone, and planned to keep that secondary to anything else that might distract her.

“I put Nathanos in charge, may the gods have mercy on us all,” Sylvanas said with a tooth grin as she set these down on the little table that still sat between the chairs.

Jaina wasn’t sure what to think. She’d spent so much effort not thinking about any of this. Her focus on the present had made the imminent future that much more terrifying. But she’d long ago come to terms with the idea of giving birth by herself. Alone. That was when the plan had been different. Before any of this.

But now, not so much anymore. Now, there were going to be far too many elves in the room. Velonara was a given. Sylvanas she had hoped for. And…

“I told you Vereesa insisted on coming too, right?” Jaina asked, suddenly terrified that she hadn’t relayed this information yet.

Sylvanas snorted at that. “You did. She’ll probably be in more of a panic than anyone, but it will make for some good entertainment. You’re saying that you’re fine with me being here?”

“I was going to ask you to stay,” Jaina found herself almost whispering. 

Sylvanas just smiled at that. 

“Please kiss me before I say something very stupid about how much that means to me,” Jaina demanded, pulling at the shoulder she still held onto. 

\---

Her daughter came into the world red-faced and screaming on a day at the edge of winter, where it spills into spring. She was born just as the sun set. Sylvanas thought it a fitting entrance, but kept her place at Jaina’s back as Velonara cleaned the little girl up and then set her on her mother’s chest. Short, but pointed ears. All ten fingers and ten toes. Jaina was crying as she held her. Crying and laughing. Exhausted and overwhelmed, but happy.

So happy that she hardly noticed when Sylvanas stooped to kiss the top of her head, then left her to that moment. A moment she had been waiting for, and suffering for. A moment that Jaina sorely deserved.

Sylvanas let her have that, and went over to Vereesa, who smiled wistfully from the other side of the room. Vereesa, who she had watched come into the world in a similar manner, though she almost seemed to forget she had to cry. She remembered how nervous it made her father.

“You’re much calmer about this than I thought you’d be,” Vereesa whispered.

Sylvanas made a show of selecting a clean towel or two from the table they stood near, then turned to watch. Jaina was still crying, as was their child. A strong, healthy cry. Both of them.

“She deserves this,” was all Sylvanas could think to say. It was all she could feel either.

Sure, the child was half hers. There was no mistaking it now. But Jaina had carried it. Jaina had worked for it. And Jaina had been the cause of all of this. She did deserve her, and whatever happiness that little girl might bring her. Whatever future she might hold.

“So do you,” Vereesa said.

Strange words, coming from her. Vereesa, who was never the best mother herself. Who had even admitted this privately to Sylvanas, a time or two when they reconnected at Garrosh’s trial. Vereesa, who was the world’s worst little sister, but who had been invaluable that day in her continued encouragement and the stories about her boys that she distracted Jaina with between contractions.

Sylvanas didn’t know what to say to that. In fact, she didn’t know what to say to any of this. Much of her day had been spent silently rubbing Jaina’s shoulders and holding cold compresses. But she was glad to have been there all the same. Glad to see things through. 

So instead she just kept on watching. Jaina was so focused on the little squirming creature in her arms that she seemed to have forgotten that Velonara was still between her legs. She was so beautiful and tender as she tried to calm the baby down. Her laughter softened into sweet, whispered words. She reached out to run a finger along her little cheek. 

The baby calmed at her touch, stirring as if woken by something. Sylvanas couldn’t be sure what it was. Perhaps Jaina’s magic. Perhaps a magic that needed no other name, no mana, no runes, no rituals. She opened her eyes and looked up at her mother for the first time.

“Sylvanas,” Jaina said, still not taking her eyes off the child. “She has grey eyes.”

Sylvanas found herself drawing closer, somehow needing to see this for herself. Sure enough, the little girl was looking up to Jaina with her mother’s eyes. Her eyes. Well, as they had once been. Glowing a little less, but the color was distinct. Steel and silver. 

“Come here. You should hold her,” Jaina told her as she finally looked up, still so incredibly happy. Exhaustion rimmed her eyes with dark circles. Effort and pain lined them in red. But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered anymore.

The only thing that did was the little girl in her arms.

“All right. I’m here,” Sylvanas said as she knelt down beside them both.

\---

“Shh, go back to sleep.”

Jaina wasn’t aware that she had woken until she was met with the gray light of the room. So it was morning already. Wait, no, it had been morning before. The last time she got up. In fact, not much time could have passed between now and then.

But someone was pushing her back down into the pillows. She blinked a few times before her vision cleared enough to tell her that it was Sylvanas. And Sylvanas was already up. And that the baby was crying again.

It had only been the first night. Jaina was so exhausted. If giving birth hadn’t been enough, then the baby was quite a lot on top of it. She knew it was hard for newborns to sleep, and that they needed to eat fairly often, but she would have been eternally grateful for even a solid hour’s rest. Apparently, that was a lot to ask. 

Jaina didn’t blame her daughter. The world was a harsh place. It was worth a cry or two...or ten. 

What she didn’t expect to see was Sylvanas bending over the bassinet and picking up the baby on her own. She’d been so tentative. So careful. So hesitant with her thus far. Not in a way that told Jaina she was questioning her decisions and involvement with the whole process, no, but instead in a way that suggested she was afraid she might hurt her. 

Jaina knew that to be the case. It had come in a whispered confession against her ear the night before their daughter was born. Sylvanas was terrified of this. Undeath had made her strong. It hadn’t made her delicate or careful. And Jaina had assured her over and over again that things would be fine. That she wouldn’t hurt the baby. 

The baby, whose name was still up for debate hours later. They’d narrowed it down to three, at least, before Sylvanas hushed her off to sleep and told her they’d have plenty of time to discuss it further in the morning. Jaina wasn’t sure if this was done on purpose. Vereesa had told her something about elves and naming and the noon day sun. Jaina had her suspicions that they would arrive at an answer at exactly that time.

But now, she was watching them. Watching as Sylvanas took the bundle of blankets that was their daughter in her arms and walked with her. Slowly. Carefully. So carefully.

So carefully that she didn’t seem to notice that Jaina was awake and watching her.

She whispered to the little girl in Thalassian, “I know. I know. You probably don’t like me very much. My hands are cold. I cannot feed you. You didn’t come from my belly.”

The words were beautiful, as simple as they were. And ridiculous. Of course Sylvanas was secretly talking to her in the elven language when she thought Jaina was asleep. Of course she would. It was ridiculous and wonderful and so very, very her.

“But I promise you that I tell good stories,” Sylvanas went on. 

The baby seemed to calm a little. Enough that her desperate, confused and almost animalistic newborn cries were reduced to whimpers. 

“Let me tell you one now, little one,” Sylvanas offered. “It starts with a silly mage that doesn’t know when to give up or say no, and a ranger who will end very glad that she didn’t.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Payoffs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23423539) by [QuickYoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuickYoke/pseuds/QuickYoke)




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